The Centre of Gravity Project

ongoing

The foundations of the general theory of relativity (GR) were laid by Albert Einstein in 1915. But much of what has been built on those foundations was developed in the Renaissance Period of GR between 1955 and 1975. Indeed, without the concepts and tools formed during this Renaissance, the recent observation of gravitational waves, rewarded with the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017, and the convincing prediction of and mounting evidence for the existence of black holes, rewarded with the Nobel Prize in physics in 2020, would not have been possible. At the centre of the Renaissance of GR is Roger Penrose. It was Penrose who developed much of the tool box that made the successes of the Renaissance possible. Penrose was surrounded by and built upon the work of the newly emerging international community of relativists, in particular Hermann Bondi at Cambridge, John Wheeler at Princeton, Jürgen Ehlers at Hamburg, and Stephen Hawking at Cambridge. The Centre of Gravity Project (COGY) will combine pioneering research on the literary estates of the core figures of the Renaissance period, including unique access to the hitherto inaccessible Penrose estate, with the analysis of detailed oral-history interviews. The analysis will be helped by the creation of a novel kind of database that will help cross-correlate the different sources. The aim is to get to the bottom of the most advanced mathematical techniques and conceptual innovations of GR, concepts like black holes and event horizons. In understanding the genesis and subsequent interpretation of these concepts we will also lay the groundwork for understanding the most exciting elements of today's physics: the physics of gravitational waves as they arise from black hole and neutron star mergers, as well as of the supermassive black hole around which our entire galaxy rotates.