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GP: Fachverband Geschichte der Physik

GP 2: History of Theoretical Physics

GP 2.3: Talk

Monday, March 16, 2026, 17:15–17:45, KH 02.019

On Textbooks and their Contexts during the Renaissance of General Relativity — •Bernadette Lessel — Philosophisches Institut, Universität Bonn

The Renaissance of General Relativity refers to the period from roughly 1955 to 1975, during which the field experienced significant institutional growth and conceptual advancements. The institutional growth came in the shape of the establishment of several research centers, each typically led by a senior principal investigator (PI) guiding a group of postdoctoral researchers and doctoral students, as is well documented in the work of Roberto Lalli, Jürgen Renn, and Alexander Blum. These centers acted as intellectual schools, where knowledge of general relativity was passed on to students, which was however channeled through the lens of the PI's particular research focus. A manifestation of this was the surge of publications of school-specific textbooks on general relativity. This talk examines the textbooks produced by three influential schools, analyzing how they reflect their unique research environments and their impact on subsequent generations of relativists: 1) The Hamburg group around Pascual Jordan, who aimed at an extension of general relativity to incorporate a variable gravitational constant. 2) The Paris group led by mathematician André Lichnerowicz, whose interest was the initial value problem in general relativity. 3) The Syracuse group around Peter Bergmann, who transitioned from unified field theory -collaborating initially with Albert Einstein- to concentrating on quantum gravity.

Keywords: General Relativity; Textbooks; Pascual Jordan; André Lichnerowicz; Peter Bergmann