MG14 - Talk detail

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Rome has been one of the most important cities for the development and teaching of General Relativity in Italy all through the 20th century. It is possible to divide the historical development of this field in the Roman environment in two fairly distinct phases. The first phase consisted of the reception and further developments of general relativity theory from the late 1910s till the outbreak of World War II, and it is especially related to the works of Tullio Levi-Civita and the construction of his school at Sapienza University in Rome. The second phase starts with the postwar renewal of interest in General Relativity as a physical theory and with the related attempts to conceptualize its connection with astrophysics from the late 1950s onward – a process indissolubly linked to the international phenomenon known as the Renaissance of General Relativity and the related emergence of relativistic astrophysics. While previous historical investigations allow rewriting a fairly complete reconstruction of the first phase, the post-war process that led to the re-establishment of research in General Relativity in Rome and the construction of the links between General Relativity problems and astrophysical research is still terra incognita. In the present talk we aim at bringing out the main characteristics of the second phase from its inception till the early 1970s and to put them in connection with the evolving international context. We will show that the revitalization of General Relativity in Rome was mainly shaped by the confluence of two different research programs centered around two authoritative figures: the first was the focusing of former Levi-Civita’s student Carlo Cattaneo on the mathematical problems of General Relativity and the establishment of a research group in Rome; the second was sparked by the return in Italy of the astrophysicist Livio Gratton in 1960 and by his strong interests in theoretical problems concerning the astrophysics of very compact stars, an issue that during the 1960s was brought to the fore by the discovery of quasars, pulsars and extrasolar sources of X rays. We will also argue that the material possibilities for a novel confluence between previously separated fields in the Roman environment was made possible by deep institutional changes and, especially, by the organizational choices and visions of Edoardo Amaldi who was leading the postwar reconstruction of Italian physics.

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