Conveners
History of Relativity, Gravitation and Cosmology: Block 1
- Luís C B Crispino (Universidade Federal do Pará, Amazonia)
Description
This session is devoted to the historical developments of Gravitation, Cosmology and Relativity. Since this is the first Marcel Grossmann meeting happening after the 100th anniversary of the 1919 total solar eclipse, contributions about the pioneering experimental attempts to verify gravitational light bending effect are expected. More generically, contributions devoted to historical analysis of ancient and modern works in Gravitation and Cosmology, as well as on the first developments of relativity theory, will be appreciated. Talks with biographical aspects of scientists with significant contributions to Relativity, Gravitation and Cosmology, as well as on General Relativity tests, or other generic historical aspects of these subjects, are also welcome.
Jayme Tiomno belonged to the ‘founders generation’ of physicists in Brazil. He began working in relativity theory early in his career, at a time when it was not at all ‘fashion-able’, through the influence of his early mentor, Mario Schenberg in São Paulo. When he went to graduate school in Princeton, early in 1948, his advisor there, John Wheeler, gave him a project in General Relativity,...
It is commonly known that the Steady-state model was proposed and championed in a series of Influential papers around mid-twenty century by Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold. In contrast it is little known that, many years before, Albert Einstein briefly explored the same idea, that is of a dynamic steady state universe. Einstein tried to develop a model where the universe expanded and...
Peter Bergmann initiated in 1966 an application of Hamilton-Jacobi techniques to general relativity. Little had been done by this time on extending this analysis to gauge theories. He proved that when, as in the case of Einstein’s theory, the phase space generator of evolution consisted of a linear combination of constraints, the Hamilton principal function must be independent of spacetime...
In this contribution we report about Feynman’s route to gravitation [1], which can be traced back to the Chapel Hill Conference of 1957 [2]. As well known, Feynman was concerned about the relation of gravitation with the rest of physics. Probably for this reason, he promoted an unusual, field theoretical approach to general relativity, in which, after the recognition that the graviton must be...
We give an account of Richard Feynman’s involvement with gravitational waves, which can be traced back to 1957, when he attended the famous Chapel Hill conference on the Role of Gravitation in Physics [1]. Feynman’s contribution was further developed in a subsequent letter to Victor Weisskopf [2], completed in February 1961, as well as in his Caltech Lectures on Gravitation [3], delivered in...
The first mention of a (Newtonian) BH dates back to 1783, when Michell presented a model of a massive “Dark Star”, trapping light particles on its surface. The Schwarzschild solution from 1916 entailed two singularities – at the origin and at the Schwarzschild radius; their interpretation has been subject of an intense debate over the 20s-30s. Einstein argued that particle orbits lower than...
In 1911 Einstein proposed that light-bending by the Sun's gravitational field could be measured during a total solar eclipse. The first opportunity in which this measurement would be tried, was during the total solar eclipse of October 10, 1912. We report about the expeditions sent to Brazil to observe this eclipse, including the one from the Córdoba Observatory, from Argentina, which aimed to...
