The Renaissance of General Relativity in Context: A Historiographical Review

In the past years, a complex historical debate has emerged on the causes, origins, and manifestations of the process dubbed as the renaissance of Einstein’s theory of gravitation. After a thirty-year period of stagnation of the theory, known as its low-water-mark phase, the renaissance marks the post–World War II return of general relativity to the mainstream of physics. As an introduction to The Renaissance of General Relativity in Context, we discuss the various historical hypotheses that have been advanced and put them in dialogue with the chapters published in the volume. In discussing these studies, we argue that our previous interpretation of the renaissance process (as resulting from the interplay of social and epistemic factors) has been substantially confirmed. In addition, these studies enable our interpretation of the renaissance of general relativity to be redefined as a two-step process. A first phase of theoretical renaissance, driven by social transformations, occurred between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s and transformed the general theory of relativity into a bona fide physical theory. The second phase of this process, which we call the astrophysical turn, was an experiment-driven shift toward relativistic astrophysics and physical cosmology and was strongly related to discoveries in the astrophysical domain in the 1960s.