The revival of General Relativity at Princeton: Daring Conservatism

Abstract

Abstract. After General Relativity was established in essentially its present form in 1915 it was celebrated as a great success of mathematical physics. But the initial hopes for this theory as a basis for all of physics began to fade in the next several decades, as General Relativity was relegated to the margins of theoretical physics. Its fate began to rise in the 1950's in a revival of interest and research that over time made gravitational physics one of the hottest research topics it is today. One center of this renaissance was Princeton, where two relative newcomers explored new and different approaches to gravitational physics. Robert Dicke showed that gravity is not as inaccessible to experiment as was thought, and John Wheeler propelled it into the mainstream by proposing highly original and imaginative consequences of Einstein's theory. We will concentrate on these ideas that, in his characteristically intriguing style, Wheeler called "Daring Conservatism" --a term well known to his associates, but one he never mentioned in print. With the aid of unpublished manuscripts and notes we will explore Daring Conservatism's origin and motivation, its successes and failures, and the legacy it left behind. After Einstein's founding of General Relativity in 1915, and its initial spectacular success, there were several decades when it was relegated to the margins of theoretical physics. The reason, we feel, was two-fold. There were no further fundamental experiments to test the theory, and on the theory side there was no program that could bring general relativity back into contact with the part of physics that was making the great advances in such areas as quantum, nuclear, particle, light and solid state physics.