Golden age of general relativity
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The Golden Age of General Relativity is the period roughly from 1960 to 1975 during which the study of general relativity, which had previously been regarded as something of a curiosity, entered the mainstream of theoretical physics. During this period, many of the concepts and terms which continue to inspire the imagination of gravitation researchers (and members of the general public!) were introduced, including black holes and 'gravitational singularity'. At the same time, in closely related development, the study of physical cosmology entered the mainstream and the Big Bang became well established.
[edit] Paradigm Shifts
A number of simultaneous paradigm shifts characterize the Golden Age of general relativity. First and foremost, the Big Bang became the canonical cosmological model. Other paradigm shifts included a growing appreciation of the:
- Role of curvature in general relativity;
- Theoretical importance of the black holes;
- Importance of geometrical machinery and levels of mathematical structure, especially local versus global spacetime structure;
- Overall legitimacy of cosmology by the wider physics community.
The Golden Age witnessed the first worthy competitor to general relativity (the Brans-Dicke theory), and the first "precision tests" of gravitation theories. The era also saw a number of astounding discoveries in observational astronomy:
- Quasars (objects the size of the solar system and as luminous as a hundred modern galaxies, so distant that they date from the early years of the universe);
- Pulsars (soon interpreted as spinning neutron stars);
- The first credible candidate black hole, Cygnus X-1;
- The cosmic background radiation, hard evidence of the Big Bang and the subsequent expansion of the universe.
[edit] Timeline
Some of the major events which occurred in and around the Golden Age are:
- 1956: John Lighton Synge publishes the first relativity text emphasizing spacetime diagrams and geometrical methods,
- 1957: Felix A. E. Pirani uses Petrov classification to understand gravitational radiation,
- 1957: Richard Feynman introduces sticky bead argument,
- 1959: Pound-Rebka experiment, first precision of test of gravitational redshift,
- 1959: Lluis Bel introduces Bel-Robinson tensor and the Bel decomposition of the Riemann tensor,
- 1959: Arthur Komar introduces the Komar mass,
- 1960: Shapiro effect confirmed,
- 1960: Thomas Matthews and Allan R. Sandage associate 3C 48 with a point-like optical image, show radio source can be at most 15 light minutes in diameter,
- 1960: Carl H. Brans and Robert H. Dicke introduce Brans-Dicke theory, the first viable alternative theory with a clear physical motivation,
- 1960: Joseph Weber reports observation of gravitational waves (a claim now generally discounted),
- 1961: Pascual Jordan and Jürgen Ehlers develop the kinematic decomposition of a timelike congruence,
- 1962: Roger Penrose and Ezra T. Newman introduce the Newman-Penrose formalism,
- 1962: Ehlers and Wolfgang Kundt classify the symmetries of Pp-wave spacetimes,
- 1962: Joshua Goldberg and Rainer K. Sachs prove the Goldberg-Sachs theorem,
- 1962: Ivor M. Robinson and Andrzej Trautman discover the Robinson-Trautman null dust,
- 1962: Ehlers introduces Ehlers transformations, a new solution generating method,
- 1962: Cornelius Lanczos introduces the Lanczos potential for the Weyl tensor,
- 1962: R. Arnowitt, Stanley Deser, and Charles W. Misner introduce the ADM reformulation and global hyperbolicity,
- 1962: Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat on Cauchy problem and global hyperbolicity,
- 1962: Ozvath and Englbert Schücking rediscover the circularly polarized monochromomatic gravitational wave,
- 1962: Hans Adolph Buchdahl discovers Buchdahl's theorem,
- 1962: Hermann Bondi introduces Bondi mass,
- 1963: Roy Kerr discovers the Kerr vacuum solution of Einstein's field equations,
- 1963: Redshifts of 3C 273 and other quasars show they are very distant; hence very luminous,
- 1963: Newman, T. Unti and L.A. Tambourino introduce the NUT vacuum solution,
- 1963: Roger Penrose introduces Penrose diagrams and Penrose limits,
- 1964: R. W. Sharp and Misner introduce the Misner-Sharp mass,
- 1964: Roger Penrose proves first of the singularity theorems,
- 1964: M. A. Melvin discovers the Melvin electrovacuum solution (aka the Melvin magnetic universe),
- 1965: Newman and others discover the Kerr-Newman electrovacuum solution,
- 1965: Penrose discovers the structure of the light cones in gravitational plane wave spacetimes,
- 1965: Kerr and Alfred Schild introduce Kerr-Schild spacetimes,
- 1965: Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar determines a stability criterion,
- 1965: Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discover the cosmic microwave background radiation,
- 1966: Sachs and Ronald Kantowski discover the Kantowski-Sachs dust solution,
- 1967: Jocelyn Bell and Antony Hewish discover pulsars,
- 1967: Robert H. Boyer and R. W. Lindquist introduce Boyer-Lindquist coordinates for the Kerr vacuum,
- 1967: Werner Israel proves the no hair theorem,
- 1967: Kenneth Nordtvedt develops PPN formalism,
- 1967: Hans Stephani discovers the Stephani dust solution,
- 1967: Bryce DeWitt publishes on canonical quantum gravity,
- 1968: F. J. Ernst discovers the Ernst equation,
- 1968: B. Kent Harrison discovers the Harrison transformation, a solution-generating method,
- 1968: Brandon Carter solves the geodesic equations for Kerr-Newmann electrovacuum,
- 1968: Hugo D. Wahlquist discovers the Wahlquist fluid,
- 1969: William B. Bonnor introduces the Bonnor beam,
- 1969: Penrose proposes the (weak) cosmic censorship hypothesis and the Penrose process,
- 1969: Stephen W. Hawking proves area theorem for black holes,
- 1969: Misner introduces the mixmaster universe,
- 1970: Franco J. Zerilli derives the Zerilli equation,
- 1970: Vladimir A. Belinskiǐ, Isaak Markovich Khalatnikov, and Evgeny Lifshitz introduce the BKL conjecture,
- 1970: Chandrasekhar pushes on to 5/2 post-Newtonian order,
- 1970: Hawking and Penrose prove trapped surfaces must arise in black holes,
- 1970: the Kinnersley-Walker photon rocket,
- 1970: Peter Szekeres introduces colliding plane waves,
- 1970: Martin Kruskal and Peter Szekeres independently introduce the Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates for the Schwarzschild vacuum,
- 1971: Peter C. Aichelburg and Roman U. Sexl introduce the Aichelburg-Sexl ultraboost,
- 1971: Introduction of the Khan-Penrose vacuum, a simple explicit colliding plane wave spacetime,
- 1971: Robert H. Gowdy introduces the Gowdy vacuum solutions (cosmological models containing circulating gravitational waves),
- 1971: Cygnus X-1, the first solid black hole candidate, discovered by Uhuru satellite,
- 1971: William H. Press discovers black hole ringing by numerical simulation,
- 1971: Harrison and Estabrook algorithm for solving systems of PDEs,
- 1971: James W. York introduces conformal method generating initial data for ADM initial value formulation,
- 1971: Robert Geroch introduces Geroch group and a solution generating method,
- 1972: Jacob Bekenstein proposes that black holes have a non-decreasing entropy which can be identified with the area,
- 1972: Carter, Hawking and James M. Bardeen propose the four laws of black hole mechanics,
- 1972: Sachs introduces optical scalars and proves peeling theorem,
- 1972: Rainer Weiss proposes concept of interferometric gravitational wave detector,
- 1972: J. C. Hafele and R. E. Keating perform Hafele-Keating experiment,
- 1972: Richard H. Price studies gravitational collapse with numerical simulations,
- 1972: Saul Teukolsky derives the Teukolsky equation,
- 1972: Yakov B. Zel'dovich predicts the transmutation of electromagnetic and gravitational radiation,
- 1973: P. C. Vaidya and L. K. Patel introduce the Kerr-Vaidya null dust solution,
- 1973: Publication by Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne and John A. Wheeler of the treatise Gravitation, the first modern textbook on general relativity,
- 1973: Publication by Stephen W. Hawking and George Ellis of the monograph The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime,
- 1973: Geroch introduces the GHP formalism,
- 1974: Russell Hulse and Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr. discover the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar,
- 1974:James W. York and Niall Ó Murchadha present the analysis of the initial value formulation and examine the stability of its solutions,
- 1974: R. O. Hansen introduces Hansen-Geroch multipole moments,
- 1974: Tullio Regge introduces the Regge calculus,
- 1974: Hawking discovers Hawking radiation,
- 1975: Chandrasekhar and Steven Detweiler compute quasinormal modes,
- 1975: Szekeres and D. A. Szafron discover the Szekeres-Szafron dust solutions,
- 1976: Penrose introduces Penrose limits (every null geodesic in a Lorentzian spacetime behaves like a plane wave),
- 1978: Penrose introduces the notion of a thunderbolt,
- 1978: Belinskiǐ and Zakharov show how to solve Einstein's field equations using the inverse scattering transform; the first gravitational solitons,
- 1979: Richard Schoen and Shing-Tung Yau prove the positive mass theorem.
[edit] End of an era
The Golden Age is generally held to have ended with Stephen Hawking's discovery of Hawking radiation.
