Seminar titled "The Genesis and Transformation of General Relativity", given by Prof. Jurgen Renn, director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin, DE)
08 October 2018 from 16:00 to 18:00
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Aula Magna, Via Irnerio 46, Bologna
The discovery of gravitational waves is one of the most spectacular breakthroughs. How are such breakthroughs achieved? Was the first terrestrial measurement of gravitational waves simply an expected outcome of the persistent efforts that were made to confirm Einstein’s prediction a century ago? In the following, I argue that the pathway to this discovery was neither one of linear progress nor of sudden paradigm shifts but rather the result of a long-term transformation of knowledge with many surprising twists and turns.
The 2015 breakthrough has a long prehistory. It goes back to calculations performed by Einstein a century ago and even beyond to the first discussions of gravitation as a field comparable to the electromagnetic field and to speculations about its propagation with finite speed. Einstein’s formulation of special relativity in 1905 was a first major turning point in this long prehistory as it definitively challenged Newton’s conception of gravitation as an instantaneous action at a distance.
