[>] “I wanted to live for the rest of my days”: H. Bondi in Kragh (1996), p. 166.
“would continue . . . sometimes being rather repetitious”: T. Gold in Kragh (1996), p. 186.
[>] “I am afraid all we can do is to accept the paradox”: W. de Sitter in Kragh (1996), p. 74.
“It was an irrational process that cannot be described”: Hoyle (1950).
[>] “a distinctly unsatisfactory notion”: Ibid.
Dead of Night: This is a British film by Alberto Cavalcanti (1945).
[>] “about one atom every century”: Hoyle (1955), p. 290.
two papers: The two first steady-state papers are Bondi and Gold (1948) and Hoyle (1948).
“I do not believe the hypothesis”: E. A. Milne in Kragh (1996), p. 190.
“for if there is any law which has withstood”: Born (1949).
“romantic speculation”: Michelmore (1962), p. 253.
“worn out with explaining points of physics”: F. Hoyle in Kragh (1996), p. 192.
[>] “I found it difficult to get my papers published”: Ibid.
“I do not think it unreasonable to say”: Ibid., p. 270.
[>] The birth of radio astronomy: Jansky (1933), Reber (1940), and Reber (1944).
[>] “I think the theoreticians have misunderstood”: M. Ryle at the RAS, 1955, in Lang and Gingrich (1979).
[>] “If we accept the conclusion that most of the radio stars”: Ryle (1955).
“Don’t trust them”: T. Gold in Weart (1978).
[>] “catalogue is compared . . . the Cambridge catalogue is affected by the low”: Mills and Slee (1956).
“Radio astronomers must make considerable progress”: Hanbury-Brown (1959).
“this has happened more than once”: Bondi (1960), p. 167.
[>] “appear to provide conclusive evidence”: Ryle and Clarke (1961).
“the Bible was right”: Evening News and Star, February 10, 1961.
“I certainly don’t consider this the death”: H. Bondi in the New York Times, February 11, 1961.
7. WHEELERISMS
Wheeler is a great character and the driving force behind modern general relativity. His biography, Wheeler and Ford (1998), candidly exposes his two sides: the “radical” and the “conservative.” But, as importantly, the atmosphere at the time and the bizarre alliance between industry and relativists is well described in DeWitt and Rickles (2011) and DeWitt-Morette (2011) as well as in Mooallem (2007) and Kaiser (2000). It is worthwhile to browse through the Gravity Research Foundation website, at http://www.gravityresearchfoundation.org, where you can find DeWitt’s winning essay.
The realization that quasars are cosmological is well described in Thorne (1994) and in Schmidt’s interview for the AIP, Wright (1975). The atmosphere in Schild’s group at Austin is described to great effect in Melia (2009), and a great firsthand account of what happened at the first Texas Symposium can be found in Schucking (1989) and Chiu (1964).
[>] “my first step”: Wheeler (1998), p. 228.
[>] “radical conservative”: A. Komar in Misner (2010).
“liked to tell us in class”: Wheeler (1998), p. 87.
[>] Feynman: A fascinating description of Richard Feynman’s science can be found in Krauss (2012).
“by pushing a theory to its extremes”: Wheeler (1998), p. 232.
[>] “For many years this idea of collapse”: Ibid., p. 294.
[>] “space traveller”: B. DeWitt’s essay “Why Physics?” in DeWitt-Morette (2011).
“a sojourn [that] did not make good professional sense”: S. Weinberg obituary of B. DeWitt in DeWitt-Morette (2011).
“What goes up will come down”: R. Babson in GRF website.
“she was unable to fight gravity”: Ibid.
[>] “Space Ship Marvel Seen”: New York Herald Tribune, November 21, 1955.
“New Air-Dream Planes”: New York Herald Tribune, November 22, 1955.
“Future Planes”: Miami Herald, December 2, 1955.
[>] “Conquest of Gravity”: New York Herald Tribune, November 20, 1955.
“eventually be controlled like light and radio waves”: Ibid.
“grossly practical things . . . any frontal attack”: B. DeWitt’s winning essay, 1953, at the GRF website.
[>] “gravitation has received . . . peculiarly difficult . . . fundamental equations are almost hopeless of solution . . . the phenomenon of gravitation”: Ibid.
“the quickest $1000 I ever earned”: B. DeWitt in DeWitt-Morette (2011).
“In the minds of the public”: A. Bahnson in DeWitt and Rickles (2011).
[>] “The main meeting began yesterday”: Feynman (1985).
[>] “There exists . . . one serious difficulty”: R. Feynman in DeWitt and Rickles (2011).
“the best viewpoint”: Ibid.
[>] “Relativity seems almost to be a purely”: R. Dicke in DeWitt and Rickles (2011).
[>] “Something terrible happened at the office today”: M. Schmidt in Wright (1975).
“mere peanuts by cosmological standards”: Time magazine, November 3, 1966.
[>] “American scientists outside of geophysics ”: Schucking (1989).
[>] “science starved south”: Ibid.
“energies which lead to the formation of radio”: Robinson, Schild, and Schucking (1965).
[>] “incredibly beautiful”: Life magazine, January 24, 1964.
“quasars”: Chiu (1964).
“the issue of the final state”: J. Wheeler in Harrison, Thorne, Wakano, andWheeler (1965).
[>] “utter disbelief . . . distinguished participant”: Schucking (1989).
“The scientists, having stretched their imagination”: Life magazine, January 24, 1964.
“Here we have a case”: Robinson, Schild, and Schucking (1965).
“Let us all hope that it is right”: Ibid.
8. SINGULARITIES
By far the best book on the Golden Age of General Relativity is Thorne (1994); it is exhaustive, detailed, and filled with personal anecdotes. It lays out the three main schools (Cambridge, Moscow, and Princeton) that fueled the renaissance of the field. Melia (2009) has a complementary view, describing how black hole astrophysics has developed until today. For the Soviet side of the story, there is an idiosyncratic collection of anecdotes and reminiscences about Zel’dovich and his disciples in Sunyaev (2005), some of which are developed in Novikov (2001). The discovery of pulsars is beautifully told in Bell Burnell (2004).
[>] “Wheeler’s talk made a real impression on me”: R. Penrose, private communication, 2011.
“Golden Age of General Relativity”: Thorne (1994).
[>] “Well, you can ask Dennis”: Ibid.
[>] “support the ‘old Einstein’ against the new”: Ibid.
“We didn’t really ask where the money”: Ibid.
Kerr and Penrose: A vivid description of R. Kerr and R. Penrose at the first Texas Symposium can be found in Schucking (1989).
[>] “They didn’t pay much attention to him”: R. Penrose, private communication, 2011.
[>] “Landau’s Theoretical Minimum”: A description can be found in Ioffe (2002).
[>] “that bitch”: L. Landau on Y. Zel’dovich in Gorelik (1997).
“That’s it. He’s gone”: L. Landau in Gorelik (1997).
[>] “You couldn’t really prove anything doing it the way they did it”: R. Penrose, private communication, 2011.
[>] “Deviations from spherical symmetry”: Penrose (1965).
“I hid in the corner . . . too embarrassing”: R. Penrose, private communication, 2011.
[>] “It was really that plot that converted Dennis”: M. Rees, private communication, 2011.
[>] “first couple of years involved a lot of very heavy work”: Bell Burnell (2004).
“When I left I could swing a sledge hammer”: Ibid.
“We had begun nicknaming”: Ibid.
“Unusual signals”: Hewish et al. (1968).
“journalists w
ere asking relevant questions”: Bell Burnell (1977).
[>] “They’d turn to me”: Bell Burnell (2004).
“The Girl Who Spotted the Little Green Men”: The Sun, March 6, 1968.
“pulsars”: Daily Telegraph, March 5, 1968.
“I did get to go in the end”: J. Bell Burnell, private communication, 2011.
Zel’dovich: A commented collection of Zel’dovich’s most significant papers can be found in Ostriker (1993).
“It is difficult, but interesting”: Sunyaev (2005).
“The Godfather of psychoanalysis”: Ostriker (1993).
[>] “extremely massive objects of relatively small size”: Salpeter (1964).
“having to drain”: R. Penrose in John (1973).
“completely collapsed gravitational object”: Wheeler (1998), p. 296.
“after you get around to saying”: J. Wheeler in the New York Times, October 20, 1992.
“We would be wrong to conclude”: Lynden-Bell (1969).
[>] “The story of the phenomenal transformation”: DeWitt and DeWitt (1973).
[>] “There were three groups”: M. Rees, private communication, 2011.
“Despite our desperate efforts”: Novikov (2001).
“I saw black holes change”: R. Penrose, private communication, 2011.
9. UNIFICATION WOES
The rise of quantum electrodynamics and the standard model has been written about in detail over the past decades. A meaty tome on the development of QED is Schweber (1994), but a much more digestible description of the history is Close (2011). DeWitt-Morette (2011) is an idiosyncratic biography of Bryce DeWitt with an interesting and varied collection of his writings. A masterful and utterly compelling biography of Dirac is Farmelo (2010), and it is worth reading some of his papers just to get a sense of the economy of prose.
The proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Quantum Gravity in Isham, Penrose, and Sciama (1975) is fascinating, a real time capsule of what was going on at the time, but more recent reviews can be found in Duff (1993), Smolin (2000), and Rovelli (2010). A first account of the discovery of black hole radiation can be found in Hawking (1988) and Thorne (1994). Ferguson (2012) is a reasonably complete biography of Hawking, fleshing out the background to his main discovery.
[>] “What is the gravitational field doing there”: B. DeWitt in DeWitt-Morette (2011).
“That is a very important problem”: W. Pauli to B. DeWitt in DeWitt-Morette (2011).
[>] “very dissatisfied with the situation . . . This is just not sensible”: Kragh (1990), page 184.
[>] “Dirac was this ghost we rarely saw”: G. Ellis, private communication, 2012.
[>] “greeted with hoots of derision”: M. Duff, private communication, 2011, and Duff (1993).
“wasn’t doing physics”: P. Candelas, private communication, 2011.
“What God hath torn asunder”: Isham, Penrose, and Sciama (1975).
[>] “It appears that the odds are stacked against us”: M. Duff in Isham, Penrose, and Sciama (1975).
Nature article on the symposium: The write-up of the Oxford symposium was anonymous in Nature, 248, 282 (1974).
[>] “We emphasize that one should not regard T”: Bekenstein (1973).
“evaporate”: Hawking (1974).
“a fairly small explosion”: Ibid.
[>] “People treated Hawking with great respect”: P. Candelas, private communication, 2011.
[>] “I was greeted with general incredulity”: Hawking (1988).
“the main attraction”: Nature, 248, 282 (1974).
“one of the most beautiful”: D. Sciama in Boslough (1989).
“like candy rolling on the tongue”: J. Wheeler as reported by B. Carr in The Observer, January 1, 2012.
10. SEEING GRAVITY
The tragic story of Joseph Weber is well known in the field but not often written about. Collins (2004) is a thorough study of the development of gravitational wave physics by a sociologist. He started interviewing the participants when Weber was still on a high, and his book is full of interviews and quotes. It is a must-read if you want to get the full story of how the field has developed and the battles that proponents of LIGO had to fight in order to build it. Thorne (1994) is an insider’s view of the story by the elder statesman of gravitational wave physics. Kennefick (2007) does an excellent job of discussing the roots of the field and filling in the back story, and Bartusiak (1989) and the more up-to-date Gibbs (2002) summarize progress at different stages. The history of numerical relativity is neatly summarized in Appell (2011).
It is well worth looking at some of the original material. For example, the discussion of the reality of gravitational waves at the Chapel Hill meeting in DeWitt and Rickles (2011) is fascinating. Weber’s sequence of papers—Weber (1969), Weber (1970a), Weber (1970b), and Weber (1972)—is a march toward greater certainty. He is then brutally struck down in Garwin (1974).
[>] “We’re number one in the field”: J. Weber in the Baltimore Sun, April 7, 1991.
[>] “speed of thought”: A. Eddington in Kennefick (2007).
reality of gravitational waves: A discussion of the reality of gravitational waves can be found in DeWitt and Rickles (2011).
[>] “A good feature is the fact”: Weber (1970b).
Weber’s results: Coverage of Weber’s results can be found in Time magazine and the New York Times in 1970.
sources of gravitational radiation: A review of the hypothetical sources of gravitational radiation at the time can be found in Tyson and Giffard (1978).
[>] “Since the high rate of mass loss”: Sciama, Field, and Rees (1969).
[>] “people were very suspicious”: B. Schutz, private communication, 2012.
[>] “did not result from gravity waves”: Garwin (1974).
[>] Taylor’s results: Taylor’s plot was shown at the ninth Texas Symposium in Munich, 1978, and the proceedings were published as Ehlers, Perry, and Walker (1980).
[>] “either the programmer will shoot himself”: C. Misner in DeWitt and Rickles (2011).
[>] solving for colliding black holes on a computer: The first steps are described by L. Smarr in Christensen (1984).
“Naive things weren’t working”: F. Pretorius, private communication, 2011.
[>] “There was a serious possibility”: Ibid.
[>] “Most of the astrophysical community”: A. Tyson in the New York Times, April 30, 1991.
“should wait for someone to come up”: J. Ostriker in the New York Times, April 30, 1991.
[>] “under the radar”: F. Pretorius, private communication, 2011.
“pure agony”: Ibid.
“There was quite a bit of excitement”: Ibid.
[>] “A great man is not afraid to admit publicly”: F. Dyson in Collins (2004).
[>] “by the time he was opposing LIGO”: B. Schutz, private communication, 2012.
11. THE DARK UNIVERSE
The phenomenal success story of modern cosmology is well documented. Peebles, Page, and Partridge (2009) includes a list of testimonials and essays with a description of the rise and rise of the field. It is well worth reading some of the books that cropped up along the way, such as Overbye (1991) or the compilation of interviews in Lightman and Brawer (1990). A personal memoir of the COBE discovery is Smoot and Davidson (1995) with a more journalistic take in Lemonick (1995). Panek (2011) is a fantastic description of the march toward the cosmological constant during the late 1990s with much of the gory detail of who did what in the supernova searches. The AIP interviews with Peebles—Harwitt (1984), Lightman (1988b), and Smeenk (2002)—are a wonderful source for his view of the universe. For more detailed explanations of our current theory of the universe, you might read Silk (1989) and Ferreira (2007). It is well worth browsing through some of the main early papers of modern cosmology in Bernstein and Feinberg (1986) and taking a look at the Einstein Centenary proceedings, Hawking and Israel (1979), and the Critical Dialogues proceedings, Turok (1997).
[>] “a fundamental science . . . the grandest of environmental sciences”: M. Rees in Turok (1997).
[>] “the cosmological constant”: Peebles (1971).
“the dirty little secret”: J. Peebles, private communication, 2011.
[>] “Rather quickly in my career”: J. Peebles in Smeenk (2002).
“a limited subject . . . a science with two or three numbers”: J. Peebles in Lightman (1988b).
“To him physics was certainly theory but it had to lead”: J. Peebles in Smeenk (2002).
“We’ve been scooped”: R. Dicke as told by J. Peebles in Smeenk (2002).
[>] a difficult, open problem that hardly anyone wanted to work on: While Peebles and his contemporaries really established the field of physical cosmology, the idea that there is some fundamental connection between the expanding hot Big Bang model and the formation of galaxies appears first in Lemaître (1934) and Gamow (1948).
[>] large structures: The ideas leading up to the formation of large-scale structure can be found in Silk (1968), Sachs and Wolfe (1967), Peebles and Yu (1970), and Zel’dovich (1972).
[>] “No one paid any attention to our paper”: J. Peebles, private communication, 2011.
“stream of galaxies . . . supergalaxy”: G. de Vaucouleurs in Lightman (1988a).
“We have no evidence for the existence”: Ibid.
[>] “Superclustering is nonexistent”: Ibid.
“good observations are worth more than another mediocre theory”: M. Davis on Peebles in Lightman and Brawer (1990).
“flabbergasted . . . I wrote some pretty vitriolic papers with examples”: J. Peebles in Lightman (1988b).
[>] “inner space and outer space”: A historic conference on connecting “inner space” and “outer space” was held at Fermilab in 1984 and written up in Kolb et al. (1986).
[>] “The density of luminous matter”: F. Zwicky in Panek (2011), p. 48.
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