Reception of Relativity in Germany / General Relativity in the Netherlands

0:00 In Lecas' statistics, Germany takes the first place both in the numbers of authors, 30%, and of publications, 38%. Thus it seems to me that the German book publication statistics should more or less reproduce Le Casse and for the other years give a first insight into the more than likely discussion induced by Einstein's relativity in all circles and classes of Germany and German-speaking countries. Let me first show you Le Casse statistics. so that's the years and here is the number of ecris and you can read that he doubts that this fall down from the peak is real because he stopped his bibliography at the end of 1923 now some methodical problems arise During the period studied, articles in scientific journals often were not just reprinted as they are nowadays, but also offered under separate cover through the bookstores in the form of booklets. In the statistics, I included such as books, except that the publisher sold them in commission, that is, not on his own risk, but on the risk of the learned society editing the journal. For example, I have not included the proceedings of the Prussian Academy of Science because they are published on its own list. On the other hand, quite a few anti-relativists published themselves for lack that this author and publisher are the same. I took them into account because this is the only way non-Orthodox opinions can be voiced. Up to now, I dated and identified a total of 318 books without actually having seen more than half of them. About 60 titles still wait to be used or dated for their relevancy to relativity determined. That's books on cosmology and natural philosophy and things like that. There's some questions on relativity discussed. So, my statistics is the next new graph, you see it, now it's more or less that what you do is the cards plot until this peak was in 1922, the peak here, and book publications

2:30 in 1921. and another point I should mention is that I included in the plot only the first edition of books with one or two exceptions where the first edition falls outside the period of study. Now it's clear from the various plots that the upsurge in book publication on relativity with its peak in 1921 arose after the announcement of the light deflection measurements at the November 1990. However, the end of World War I can also explain some or all of the growing activity. If it exists at all, we see only a minor increase due to the Nobel Prize won by Einstein and announced in 1922. That might be a little hump after that decrease. I don't know. The first sharp decrease in book publication is well correlated with the monetary inflation 1922-1923. In order to find out if it stands for a real decrease of interest in relativity, a comparison with a book publishing activity in other countries should be made, something which I have not yet done. Now, in order to check the influence, well, let me first put something on top of it. First of all, the relativist publication activity that's books in favor of relativity theory I've given the definite figures that's 169 and now I put on top of this the books against relativity, that's the anti-relativists which is the green curve and it's 149 and it's almost as many as relativist, something that surprised me, and if you deduct from the relativist books those on natural philosophy, you get equal numbers. Now some of the books in the green line are crank books. People that do not believe in Newtonian theory are people that, okay, so but only very minor number. Now in order to check the influence of the development of quantum mechanics on

5:00 the book publication, Activity and Relativity, I also made the statistics of books on the Paul Sommerfeld atom model and quantum theory again from 1919 to 1945. There are also problems because in the 30s the field developed rapidly with applications to atomic, molecular and nuclear physics. In the 40s, even elementary particle physics appears. In my statistics, I am going to show, I included books on atomic physics before 1926, but discarded those published afterwards. The effects of nuclear physics books and some atom physics books after 1926 are minor and not included in the plot I am now going to produce. Let's see, I take off these details and put on the quantum mechanics books. And that was the second surprise I got, because it's clear that quantum mechanics in Germany never received as much publicity as relativity did. Also, it never encountered as much resistance and resilience. Now, it is not so obvious from the statistics that with the advent of quantum mechanics the interest in 1925-26, the interest in relativity lessened. Any such effect is masked by the ongoing anti-relativist partition activity reaching a second climate at the beginning of the 30s. I mean, I might say that again the green lines. there's a peak here and this is the year of the well preposterous book 100 authors against Einstein I'll put it on for you well today you could write the book 149 I think it was books against Einstein Now although these results might not be surprising to you, it is gratifying to me that they are backed by empirical data, something I have not seen after the past statistics.

7:30 It was astonishing for me that relatively few books in German concerning quantum theory and its applications in its period to exist. However, this fits well to the decline of the number of science publications in German during the 30s. So this ends the first point I want to make today. Now with this wealth of information I'm going to digest, which is in these books, and I wanted to speak here on the spectrum of relativists and the crowd of anti-relativists, but I didn't manage to write it down. So I'm concentrating on a small item, which I happen to formulate a bit better. I'm addressing myself now to the protest against relativity theory and the anti-Einstein campaign in Germany in the years 1920 and 1922. Hopefully something is to be learned about relativity theory if we understand the difficulties prepared to some people. Some of the original resistance still seems to live in the German-speaking countries, a subject I will speak about at another occasion. Finally, up to now, this protest and anti-Einstein campaign is dealt with in the literature, not with sufficient detail as to picture clearly what went on at the time. Also, not all reports take full notice of the campaigns being a continuation into the field of science or the political struggle at the beginning of the Weimar Republic. Usually, the main explanation for the protest against relativity and the anti-Einstein campaign suggested it is anti-Semitism. Russian-wise writers seem to rename it into mere nationalism or fascism. Other arguments external to physics used by anti-relativists among the calling Einstein a revolutionary and a scientific orgemic, bringing into science, dataism, and futurism things deemed to them to be despicable. That anti-Semitism was ever-present is shown by the following book advertisement. This is a book of an anti-relativist and it says, the red line, lines that are free of anti-semitic or anti-semitic tendons.

10:00 So from this you see that there was something under discussion at the start of the day. In particular... Can you hear that? Geisner, that's, let's see, early 20s. Well, I can't give you the 5-step points, but I don't get it down. That, in particular, within the student body, at the end and turn of the 19th century, anti-Semitism played an important role, and I recommend a new book, just a chapter here to Göttingen about students and with questions for it. Nevertheless, a study going more deeply into the relative weights of anti-Semitism and other non-science motives as factors relevant for the anti-einstein campaign is needed. I mean, there also exists of Texans to a relativity theory internal to physics. I'm not going to read this incomplete collection I put down here, but turn right away to the anti-einstein campaign. whatever the main drive behind it was, as Eichenstein tells us, Einstein felt menaced by anti-Semitism and reacted correspondently. As we shall see, his feelings were well-founded. Nevertheless, Elton and Kleinert documented that Einstein was first and explicitly returned to anti-Semitism in public before any of his serious opponents. In particular, I have not yet seen documented proof that the infamous meeting organized by the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Naturforschung der Heidruf einer Wissenschaft, GV, that is, the working team of German scientists for preserving pure science, Rochester, of August 24, 1920, was of an anti-Semitic nature. The episode, deported by Hermann in his Einstein biographies, that is, that at the end of the meeting the student shouted in the direction of Einstein's seat, one should jump at the of this Jew is shifted to a public meeting in spring of 1919 by Grundmann. Grundmann saws, however, a book of Lehmann Busbö, secretary of the Bund Neues Vaterland, members of which Einstein and his wife Elsa were, thus given neither a precise date nor a distinct location. Finally, Goethe refers to the Berlin Daily Freiheit Liberty, calling it the organ of Einstein's

12:30 party, which carried the same story in its issue of August 31, 1920, that is, four days after Einstein's public reply to the meeting in the Berliner Tageblatt, in which he expressed himself of being attacked as a liberal-minded Jew. Ernst Gehrke, 1978 to 1960, a student of Emil Barbo, worked as an experimental physicist and Oberregierungsrat at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstatt in Berlin in 1920. He was a specialist in optics, having invented in 1903 the Lummer-Gehrke-Platte, a device for precision interferometry. In 1908, he had discovered with O. Reichenheim the anode rays. In 1921, that is after the anti-Einstein meeting of 1920, he became extraordinary professor at the University of Berlin. Later in his career, he was named director of optics laboratory at the PTR, developed further important interferometry apparatus, and worked after World War II in the German Bureau of Standards in Berlin. In 1923, he contributed an article on corpuscular radiation and thin gases to the Handbook of Electricity and Magnetism edited by the Munich experimental physicist Leo Kratz. Later, Gertrude himself edited a two-volume handbook of physical optics in which respected scientists, among others, Sehman, Auerbach and Gantz, dealt with all aspects of the subject, including quantum mechanics. The choice of the contributors was not unbiased, however. Quantum mechanics is presented by the unknown young mathematician Kramer, while the chapter on optics of moving bodies is written by the anti-relativist Sackrep, mathematics and philosophy professor Mohor Wichit. Philip Frank calls Geert a good Berlin physicist, while Lennart even suggested him for the Nobel Prize in 1921. Since 1911, Gerke was critical of Einstein's special relativity theory, publishing a stream of papers, essays, and notes collected later in the booklet. During the anti-Einstein meeting of August 24, 1920,

15:00 he was the second and last speaker after the demagogical organizer Paul Weyland. His talk was considered believing, though boring, by von Laun. Funk describes him as a man who lacks the astuteness of the intellect and the flight of fantasy needed to progress from the particular facts to an encompassing insight. Infeld lets him put forward objections which are up to the date, common with those not able to understand general relativity theory. Einstein in his public reply on the Anti-Relativity Theory Company Limited, as he called his adversaries, unworthy of an answer from his pen. Surprisingly, after what had happened, one year and a half later, Einstein and Gehrke interacted because both, together with Max von Laue, Gustav Müller, the director of the Potsdam Astrophysical Laboratory, and Walter Nernst, the director of the Physical Chemistry Institute of the University of Berlin, were nominated by Max Planck on February 9, 1922 to sit on the steering board curatorium of the Potsdam Astrophysical Laboratory. Gehrke represented the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstatt. On February 27, the board was installed by the Preußische Ministerium for a period of three years, during which it met at least four times with Einstein being pressed. This fact indicates that the relationship between Einstein and Gehrke was not as disturbed as to keep either one of them from joining the board. However, in the next three-year period, starting in 1925, replaced by Friedrich Pasch, a well-known tech post. This may be connected with the public protest of anti-relativists on the occasion of the Naturhoch-Sammlung in Leipzig in September of 1922, signed also by Gerke, or in the publishing of Gerke's book on Relativity as a Mass and Most. I think I have a title of this book here. Actually, I mean, it's the Mass. protection. As far as the series of 20 public lectures announced by Weiland's Arbeitsgemeinschaft is concerned, only one person seems to have taken place on September 2, that's roughly one week later than the 1st, 1920. Ludwig Glaser, substituting for the Prague philosophy

17:30 professor Oscar Krauss, already known as a critic of Einstein from the 1920 spring meeting in Halle of the Kant Society talked about the so-called astronomical proofs of the relativity principle. Krauss' subject would have been relativity theory and epistemology. There exist different versions as to why Krauss did not appear in Berlin. Frank makes him the intended third speaker of the first meeting of August 24, invited because of his Jewish origin because his Jewish origin could provide a cover-up. He lets him cancel his talk on short notice because some friends were able to explain to him the intention of the meeting. However, Professor Johannes Riem, observator at the Astronomisches Recheninstitut of the University of Berlin since 1905, in a letter in the Frankfurt Weekly Umschau of October 2nd, 1920, that is roughly a month after the second event, states that Kaus sent a telegram one day before his scheduled talk saying that he was refused the visa for political reasons. The astronomer Green, who claims to be no opponent of Einstein but whose signature is also on the 1922 protest in Leipzig, gives the vitriolic comment, in such a way relativity is protected by the immigration service. This remark fits well to a complaint filed by Gehrke, that is, that the printing of his short, critical comment with respect to the remark of Einstein's in the Naturwissenschaft in the summer of 1914 was stopped by Einstein's veto. Johannes Stark, in his attack on relativity and the poor Somerfeld quantum theory, claims that Gehrke could not become poor professor of physics in Germany of this fight against theory of relativity. And as biased as this remark might appear because Johannes Stark was no-spoken critic of Einstein later, or one of the leading members of German physics and antisemit, I've met at least one German physicist who claimed to have played a leading role in hindering Gertz's career. Dr. Ludwig Lasser, a substitute for Oscar Krauss, an applied physicist, had

20:00 studied in Berlin, both at the University and the Technische Hochschule and at the Imperial College of Science in London. After being an engineer with Krupp, he became private consent in Würzburg in 1921 as a protégé of Johannes Stark and an opponent of the Boer-Sommerfeld quantum theory. As late as 1939, he had kept to the two theses put forward for his qualification in 1921, that is, that the ether is of a substantial nature and that the experimental situation does not force us to abandon the absolute space theory table of special relativity. In Berlin, he edited a journal for building and crafts enterprises from 1915 to 1922. Born, Max Born, connects the name Glaser with one of the most evil anti-relativists. In fact, Glaser, after 1933, became an active member of the Deutsche Physik movement and unbearable in his antisemitism. With Goethe and Glaser being the only physicists directly instrumental in the 1920 anti-Einstein campaign organized by Paul Weiland's Arbeitsgemeinschaft, the question about Geerke's position arises was he also anti-semitical or not until now I did not find any printed material with which this question would be decided in a letter to the West Berlin daily Tagesspiegel September 1970 Geerke's son protested against attempts to connect his father with anti-semitism he said that his father never left the grounds of objectivity scientific standards and his opposition to Einstein's theories. The formulation of parts of the latter however casts some doubt as to what were the prejudices of Gehrke Jr. After all, Ernst Gehrke had associated himself with Paul Weiland, who not only was a demagogue, but also an outspoken anti-Semitic. This must have become obvious to Gehrke in 1921, that is half a year later or so, when publish his Deutsch-Pöcklische Monatshefte. Let me show you the first page of the first issue. Well, I apologize for the unclear figure, but I couldn't print it for microphone directly on this view graph.

22:30 Something very surprising is, of course, that next to the swastika, which is clear in itself, there appears a reading that says, introduction of monarchy. So, maybe that was a co-op, I don't know. The figure is supposedly depicting Mammoth, Mammoth, it says the master of the world, keeping a virgin Germany and destroying her. So, I think that's obvious. In fact, now this was 1921, the first anti-Einstein meeting was in August 20. Now, in fact, we know from a letter to Lennart in February of 1921, published by Kleiner, that he cut his relations with Weiner. Willy Frank confesses ignorance about Weiner's past, his education and occupation. Einstein, in his reply of August 27, 1920, to the Anti-Vertilist Society, wondered what profession Weyland had, but did not know. Clark holds Weyland nobody in scientific circles. Rundmann makes him an engineer. Max von Laue characterizes him as a Schieber-Türkisch, that is, someone feeling and reading outside legality. Obviously, they did not know that Weiland's political background was the Deutsche Nationale Volkspartei, and he was an active member of his party. Now, let me show you one poster put up for the elections by this party, which is still rather innocent. Let's see, it starts with the Prussian heart, who is healing it, and then Liederich National Volkskartei. It was a nationalistic right-wing party which also had wealthy Jewish members. However, in the 20s, it took a definite anti-Semitic turn. For example, Anna von Gierke, one of its members of parliament in 1990-1920, lost the party's She was also bored centrally because of her mother's descent from a Jewish family and because of the party's aims excluding this. Weiland expressly created his monthly, the title of which I showed you, because he found his party too soft on the Jewish press.

25:00 He also, oh, and in order to show you that this party changed to the worse, I'll show you another poster put up in front of elections, which clearly says free from Versailles and then free from the Jewish socialist birth. and that's again Deutsch National. So that was the party disorganizer of the Einstein complaint worked for. Now, Weyland also tried to found the Deutsch-Pölkische Bloc, a joiner of various ultra-right anti-Semitic groups. He was a member of the Bund der Aufrechten, which fought the Weimar Republic. Weyland also worked for an association called Deutsche Herald, the purpose of which was to master up readers for the conservative nationalistic Berlin newspaper Deutsche Zeitung. Each Monday, in behalf of the Herald, he gave a talk either on science or on the philosophy of races. What exactly the latter meant is clear from the report on a talk of Weiland in Mainz at a meeting of the local section of the Schutz und Brutzbund, another ultra-right association. Now, I have only a poster of the local Munich section of the Schutz- und Rutschbund, but in the lower corner it says no admission to Rutschbund. So, that's clear also. As was pointed out by Grundmann in presenting the aims of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Naturforscher zu erhalten und Reiner Wissenschaft in his Turkish Monats letter Weiland formulated that we strive to treat German signs of Jews. Thus, until further evidence is brought forward, we must assume that Weiland just used the anti-Einstein campaign, including physicist Gerke, for his own political maneuvering, for example for winning new members for his various political groups. That this hypothesis is not unrealistic follows from the report of the Dr. Mertz, also in the Turkish Monazette, concerning a talk on Einstein for the members of the Schutz and Putzbund Wiesbaden, who expresses various states as one of its aims to win more members.

27:30 The same envisaged speaker was Lenna, who refused to come, but sent three of his papers on Einstein's theory. Eventually, the Wiesbaden section won a professor of philosophy, Merchior Pallaghi, of Hungarian origin from Darmstadt, who believed that Einstein and Nikoski had stolen relativity theory and the space-time picture from him. We shall soon meet Pallaghi again as an anti-relativist and discuss his four-dimensional world set down in 1901, but I'm afraid I will not have the time to discuss it now. uh... let me stop now because it goes on and on and on in this direction that you see clearly what I'm intending to do and I have not written down many more so I apologize for it I have to study much more material that's nice thank you for your talk and I can only hope that you won't stop at 45 Yes, I have indeed, that's one of my interests, to follow the persons, and I have done it, and it's quite surprising what you find. I think this is a tremendous piece of work Well, the problem is that I'm a theoretical physicist and I don't want to leave it. And now while doing this work, I noticed that it's a full-time stop. You must find someone helpful. I have a few comments and questions. First of all, you said you would notify the inflation drop, if you drop a book during inflation that's connected to the inflation, you'll look at other books in other countries. I think when we compare production of books on other subjects in Germany, if it was inflation, it should be a general form. Okay, but here should I, should I, should I... The scientific books, why not look at that whole category? Or even unsightly. You do that. You do that. If it's not that. If it's no inflation, even our books should be. If that's 300 books, I mean, it will be thousands. Secondly, I don't know. Second, I have a question of quantum mechanics. The difference in the number of books might just be refreshing the fact that quantum mechanics

30:00 never made as much public impact as well. It might not mean there was less discussion among learning to public. So I think you would have to really look at journal articles to decide that question. There, obviously, no one would be hidden. Whereas a popular book you only write if you want to sell it, and the publisher will think you're going to make money out of it. So there's somebody, not you maybe, but somebody must look at that. There's really less discussion about quantum mechanics in learning journals. Maybe a step in between would be to include these proceedings of the Russian society and others that have been sold as weekly. Or look at journal articles. Yeah, but that's a lot. I just said somebody else. Okay, okay. Okay, I agree. A little more on Gerke. He was involved, I think, in the third or fourth edition of Drude's Optica. Yes, and I haven't been able to get it. I've seen it. I can say the material. I mean, it's scandalous because Druda, in the second edition of his book, was one of the first people to recognize reports of Einstein's banked on five paper. He had a footnote on Einstein's banked on five paper, which he more or less understood what was going on there. And he also, in an article later on on optics, well, he also mentioned Einstein's paper. So Druda went out of his way, completely distort Druda's approach in order to turn the textbook, the standard textile, having to attack on relativity. about it. Well, that's true. It was totally uncalled for in a textbook to start such an impact on those things. Whether anti-Semitism was a model or not, but something pathological. Yeah, because that's, you see it in every, he never missed a chance to speak out against relativity, even in this article on the corpuscular radiation in thin gases, he has two pages against relativity. And he went to the extent that he quoted a paper of Boltzmann on statistics where Boltzmann did some division of the scale into integer steps in order to do some statistical calculation as crediting him for the invention of quantum. That's in his... He anticipated Tom Kuhn. So he must... Okay. That's all your humorous remark, please. But I think you also have to look at things like of university libraries because in 1929 and 1932 you had very few publications in Relativity as well as in Quantum Mechanics. I had to be at that time in a scientific bookstore

32:30 and since the university budgets and the library budgets were cut tremendously street, the bookstores hardly could survive, that is, the publishers could not survive, they could not get any new books out, and so I think this might also give you a clue how this relates to other publications. Well, I used as my sources, maybe I can mention it now, for finding these, I would say, a German list of books given out by the person for hydrogen book handler in Leipzig that lists all books in German in the German-speaking countries, Austria and Switzerland and I used Natura and Ovitatis, a journal on new books being published by Friedlander and so on in Berlin I used the bibliography of the Swiss natural science literature and the book reports there, and I used the advertisements of the publishers in the books I have seen, actually, at the end, and so on. So I got some cost check, and I'm pretty confident that of the more important books, I didn't lose more than maybe 10%. I simply, I didn't think that you asked any, but I think that what I saw was that the books yours could not sell the books to the libel. Scientific books, these are, you know, passages, they're not there anymore. Yes, because, I mean, the budgets were simply cut. Just two more questions. We are very short in time. When I say that 25, 30 years ago, I wrote a book on the history of modern cosmology up to 1970. At the end of that time, of course, I had a very large card index of bibliography classified by subjects. Mr. Combridge? I'm sorry? Mr. Combridge? No, no, not by name. Sorry. And I just happened to notice that there was this peak around about 1920, and so I drew a graph of my own, and of course this was subject to all the selection and so on,

35:00 of special and liberal relativity together. And in fact, there was a very marked peak, and this was an international video, a very personal one, and there was a very marked peak in 1922. Well, in my first thought I took down, I just took the books I own, which of course is an international set also, and the peak appeared. But this was not just books, of course this was articles as well. Aha, okay, okay. I was wondering, in this anti-relativity sentiment being expressed, that Schrodinger has written about how financing of physics in Germany introduced tension between Berlin physics and physics elsewhere in Germany. So how much did Andy are attacking relativity when they are attacking Berlin's physics? That is to say, how many is it outside Berlin attacking Berlin that they attack it via relativity? No, but these people I talked about, they sat in Berlin. Geirke was a Berlin physicist, Glasser was in Berlin at the time, so I don't know the argument. But not only 140, like you said, were actually relativity. That's another point. No, no, that's another point. Pais, in a footnote in his book, says that the authors of this book, 100 authors against Einstein, is connected to Weyland's Arbeitsgemeinschaft. I don't think this is true. I have found no connection whatsoever. In contrast, there is evidence that they are not linked. That is a different set. But I have to check and find documents. Pius did not give any document that these authors, that's the author of Israel, Huckhaber and Weinmann, are linked to violence organization. In fact, Huckhaber itself was clearly criticized by one physicist of the Deutsche Physiksmobile because he was so bad.

37:30 That's what I'm up to, but I hope it's not being destroyed during World War II, in Berlin. I'm trying, I'm after it. because that would be the best thought. Okay, we can talk after. I think you have to hurry now to talk to them about the book in time to do their best. So I ask Professor Clark from the University of Amsterdam to get this thought of general relativity and phenomena. Thank you. Thank you. I'll start with the word, emphasizing that this is going to be a important work in progress and by no means a complete piece of research for a definite conclusion. I actually hope that you may raise more questions and answer the parts that I've raised in this way in particular to how the research is going on. Let me first give the background to what I'm going to talk about. In the years 1915, 1920 approximately, there was a huge amount, a relative huge amount, I should say, of activity in Holland,

40:00 especially in Leiden, the University of Leiden, in the field of general relativity. And I'm using the word huge because, of course, Holland is a fairly small country, and I think proportionally there was a lot of work done, much more work done here or in Holland than in many other countries. Let me just give you a list of names of people who worked on this field. Most of the names will be familiar to many of you. Drosten, Poker, Gramos, Nostrum, Lorenz, Schausen, Dresling, and the Citrus. Nostrum is on the list, although he's not a Dutchman, but at that time he was in Leiden. He was part of the Leiden group. He was married to a Dutch woman also. He spent a number of years in Leiden and moved back to Switzerland for somewhere around 1920. Now these people, as I noted, in this period, approximately five years, wrote over 30 research papers. And those are only the papers that you can rubricize in the rubric physics. There are also a lot of mathematics papers that touch on general relativity, and most of the papers by Strauss and also by his pupil, Stuart Stroud, were more pure mathematics than they were physics. Now, this background, this historical situation, raises a number of points that I would like to discuss. The first one is, I was relatively received in Holland, and what was the actual content of the work that was being performed in those five years. The second question is, how important was this work, what was the contemporary impact of it, and also a less historical question, but nevertheless interesting, what has remained of it nowadays? And the third question is, why did this activity not result in a school or perhaps a tradition of relativity theory, general relativity theory at home? Because after approximately 1920, this activity diminished rapidly, and hardly anything remained of it. Now let me address those three points consecutively. The first point, well it's obvious from the number of papers that were written that relatively

42:30 it was received favorably, and it's easy to get some indications as to why it was received favorably. In the first place, both Borance and the Urfest had very good relations with Einstein, admired work, talked to him, and Einstein visited live regularly, they had discussions, so they were up to date on what Einstein was doing, they were interested in it, and they, in their way, contributed to it. And I think a central role should be given to Lorenz, who, especially after 1913, after the Einstein-Rothman paper, got very interested in the theory, he brought a lot of time, a lot of calculations to it, and also he inspired a number of his students to work on it, and the most important of them were Drosten, and also Fokker, who was sent to Zurich to work with Einstein in the winter of 1930 and 1940, and they actually wrote a joint paper on the Nordstrom theory. And Lorient himself also published in 1950 on a theory. Fokker, apart from the work with Einstein, wrote a paper on the Einstein-Rodden And that was in 1914, Lewis and Martin Drust, also Drust started his work in 1950 to work on this solution of the field equations. Now, after 1915, the activity grows rapidly, especially after November 1915, after the final theory is published. And this also has to do with the central role of Lorenz. He started lecturing on general relativity as early as the winter of 1916, and he had in his audience people like the Sitter, Earfest, Fokker was there also. So he sort of created a general background to knowledge of general relativity, knowledge that would have been much harder to acquire from the research papers, from the papers that were really published at that time. Now, let me, before I get to my second point, briefly discuss the contents of the over 30 papers that were published in this time. Just because of lack of time I won't go into in much detail, I'll try to emphasize some

45:00 similarities and also some salient points. Let me start with Drosten. I think it's fair to say that nowadays Drosten is much more known, especially in longer stories, than he was at the time he did work. Although his work, especially on the Schwarzschild solution, or what we now call the Schwarzschild solution, is pioneering, He wasn't acknowledged as such, or not very much so, at the time he wrote it. Pauli, in his article, mentions Drosten, but not very prominently, and he gives much more credit to Spatshields in this context of the Spatshields world. Also, in other papers, his work on trajectories, et cetera, were not very widely read on getting the impression. Fokker's work. Fokker is characterized in the first place by almost a preoccupation with geometrical methods. He devotes a lot of attention to finding out geometrical interpretations of various mathematical quantities that occur in the and he also worked on clarification of a phenomenon that one might almost call a Dutch phenomenon because so many Dutch physicists worked on it and that's the phenomenon of what we now call or what one then also called you that precession briefly the precession the spinning object gets through the curvature of space-time, if you move the spinning object around to the circle in a centrally-semmetric rotational field. After one full revolution, the spin will point in a slightly different direction. That's what they call geodetic recession. That's one of the things that, as far as I could determine, was first noticed by the Dutch physicists, not only by Poker, but also by Schouten, and before that by the Citroen, They didn't know anything, but nobody knows anything. Okay, the next one on the list is Kramers.

47:30 Kramers, actually in 1920, wrote two papers, since forgotten papers on the stationary reputational field. He doesn't seem to have contributed to anything really new and important to relativity. They were more a summary of work that had been done before. He also talks a little bit on the geodetic perception in those areas. Paul Nordstrom, I already mentioned. His main achievement in those years was expansion of earlier work by Reisner on the field of mass of electric charge, nowadays known as also known as Reisman-Nocturometric, but also Reisman metric. Schouten, primarily a mathematician, and as I said, his main work, his main publications are purely mathematical, he developed this direct analysis method to approach general and he also had this totally or almost totally inaccessible notation that made his work absolutely, for physicists anyway, almost totally inaccessible. His work, his more physical work has to do with, again, a Judaic procession. Dresling, who is not also on the list, wrote, actually, he wrote only one paper. I think he was a student of Lawrence, although he never got his degree. I'm not quite sure what happened to him. His name appears in the Proceedings of the Dutch Academy in a few papers over a period of two or three years, and then he drops from sight altogether. I'm not quite sure what happened to him. I'm sure that he didn't get his degree with Lawrence. And he did some work on the generalization of Lorentz's variational principles to generate Lorentz himself wrote a number of lengthy and detailed papers on the relativity. His work will be discussed tomorrow also in Johnston's talk. Now, let me just mention two essential points. The first one is Lorentz's attempt to find a geometrical, coordinate-free formulation of the theory. And the second one is his work, his important work, although not fully original work,

50:00 on variational principles within the context of General Lifty. And I say not fully original, but also Einstein, if you see it in the next one. Now, the sitter, the last one, is a little bit of a special case. In the first place, because of his choice of topics, he mainly deals with applications of general relativity to both astronomy and cosmology. And the other specialty about the sitter is that he played an instrumental role, much more so than any other Dutch physicist in spreading the theory spreading relativity, especially to England these three papers in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society who were instrumental in making the theory known in England and you should remember that at that time England was at war with Germany and scientific contexts too were almost totally broken up apart from that, of course, Sitter wrote down his solution, his solution of field equations for an empty, non-plant universe. And this, again, gave rise to a lengthy discussion with Einstein, both in their correspondence but also in a series of papers in the Proceedings of the Academy of Amsterdam, on the relative of rotation and the physical meaning and physical content of the citrus of Moabical Solution. Now, let me try to give you some common aspects, some general aspects of this work, and also let me try to list what I think are original results in these papers. In the first place, as far as general traits are concerned, there is an emphasis on geometrical methods, especially in the work of Fokker and the work of Orens. There is also much attention to variational principles. Fokker's work shows that clearly also the work of Dresling and of course Lawrence himself. And there is this emphasis on developing this mathematical formalism.

52:30 And I should point out that it's not only Schouten who works on that, although he, of course, was the leading spirit to resolve the government, but also people like Lawrence were clearly very much interested in it. There is a report published in the Proceedings of the Academy where Lawrence, together with a mathematician from Leiden, comments on a treatise that Schouten has submitted to the Proceedings of the Academy, comments on it to see if it's suitable to be published. and this colleague called Cardinal expressed himself very favorably on the treatise, and it's clear that they both read it carefully and that they understood what was going on, which is no mean feat, because I've looked at the treatise and it's absolutely forbidding both in its contents and in its form. So far, for the general points, the more specific, say, original results that we can point at are the geodetic recession, which I mentioned several times already, the word by the Sitter, the Sitter solution of the field equations, and then the right-hand-optrometric. I frankly cannot find anything else that I could qualify as a really important contribution in the sense that it influenced the force of the So I guess the second question, the second point that I mentioned at the beginning of my talk was the importance of the work and especially what was the impact of the work has to be answered in a negative way in the sense that the impact I don't think was very great and that the importance may, from a historical point of view, may have been substantial but at least from a point of view of how the theory developed and how the theory was influenced by the work time and all. They don't think the influence was very great. Now we can of course, or we have to ask the question, why was that so? And I'm not sure if I can give you a definite final answer to it, but I think one of the points is a complex aspect that might be summarized by the word language problem. Language problem in the sense that most of these papers were published in proceedings of the Dutch Academy, in a Dutch version, also in an English version, but not in a German version. And it might very well be that, at least during that period,

55:00 the German physical literature was much more accessible and much more widely read than even the English version of the Proceedings of the Academy and Amsterdam. And the second aspect of what I call the language problem is this geometrical language that some of the physicists in Holland use, fairly soon got totally out of fashion, and the mathematical formalism that the mathematicians developed, that appealed to mathematicians only and not very much to physicists. So that was also, let's disappear from science as far as the physics community was determined. Now, let me finish with some remarks on the third point I mentioned at the beginning of my talk. Why is there no tradition, no school of general relativity in Holland? And I think the reasons for that may be summarized under the heading of personal reasons, in the sense that neither Lorenz nor Popper ever had a school in the sense that they assembled a group of students around them who pursued research in the same way as they did and who had the same research interest as they had. They did most of their research alone. They and their relations with the students were fairly formal and distant. The second point, I think, that might have played a role, is that there was never an influential Dutch textbook on general eligibility. The first one that appeared was Fokker's textbook, which appeared in 1929, and was written in Dutch, and was not translated into any other language, not at that point, at least. And so there was nothing comparable to Francis Weil's textbook in Germany, which had enormous influence, and which I think gave a great boost to the German language publications in Germany. I think that was also noted on one of the drafts that the previous people showed, when the Weil was actually marked, the draft from the company. So, I think I have to close this talk in a fairly negative tone, including that in spite of a fair amount of what objectively may be called high quality work in general by very talented people, the lasting influence of this episode, this work, was surprisingly and disappointingly strong.

57:30 Thank you, Anne, for your talk. And since we have still, say, a quarter of an hour before we go to dinner, I would like to invite you also to get general comments on the problem of reception. And let me remind you that some of the speakers have brought up some historiographical issues. In particular, I'm thinking of the talk of Dr. Kota Ley. and also Anne has spoken out some questions which may be generalized beyond the Netherlands and we could take this unique occasion to have a comparative discussion of reception in different countries. So, thank you. I think you did not mention the rather significant contribution to the problem of motion of the Dutch group. There was Roste, the Yindis, who gave it a solution for n-wall difference in slow motion, which is mentioned in Pauli, which then was developed in two different directions. I talked about it, by the way, in the first international conference. I won't say too much now. But De Sitte used that solution in his long papers in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on astronomical consequences of general relativity. then Chazee took it over in his books in France on the astronomical consequences of relativity, so it did have an international impact. The one in the other direction was that Lorenz and Droste had wrote down a variational principle and wrote down in essence what was the Einstein-Infraig-Hoffman equations. That was totally forgotten because and there I think it's entirely language difficulty because it was only in Dutch, and it was not translated until Lorentz's collected word. On the other hand, there was also something which maybe you can explain to me, which I never understood. I got told of Fokker at the General Relativity Conference in London, who had edited this, and said, how come that people don't stress the importance of this word? And he looked at me and said, well, anybody can make a mistake implying somehow did not develop the case.

1:00:00 Other questions? It seems to me you underestimate a little bit, but it seems to me it is sort of quite the center. I mean, you still sort of get references to Lawrence's work. I mean, it's still sort of people are looking at it every now and then. Also, I would like to mention that the Sillis paper, of course, was very important for three months to papers on cosmology. So I think there was a lasting impact on relativistic cosmology there. And the last time you probably didn't mention it, I find it very interesting, but actually the Sitter credits Ehrenfest with the idea of his position. Yeah, absolutely. But I thought it was just worth mentioning that. No, I can see that. And the general thing is that it's very clear, also from the correspondence between the various people, is that there were permanently discussions going on in Leiden on this topic. As far as references to Lawrence's work are concerned, I've sort of done a spot-check of several recent textbooks from General Lippey, and for instance, Wilson Farnham-Wheeler don't mention Lawrence at all. At least they don't refer to his four papers that appeared in 1960. It's not there. I was thinking more of the Journal of Hitchcock, but I occasionally see things like that. in the 1960 papers on variational principles? Well, I couldn't have to say that. But there's also a lot of work on special relativity that people refer to. You are of your opinion that Lawrence had no school, but you have a not so strict term for his school to be the invisible college. I suppose that there was a visible college around Lawrence because Einstein was also an extraordinary person to get hope, later, and when he visited I suppose there was a group around him among the Lawrence, Edmfest and also the recitals of Lawrence I suppose that this could be called a kind of school So there was a central figure of Lawrence and Einstein, so there was the center of the ideation of ideas. So if I think that this is a school, I don't know what does it mean a school in a decision, but in a role set.

1:02:30 Well, if I talk about the school, I'm much more thinking of something like the school Ian Penn had, And like the way he collaborated with his students and he communicated with them in their seminars. And that's something that Lawrence actually did not have. And his relation with the students was extremely important. And he didn't keep up relations with most of them after they got the doctor. Some of them even before they got the doctor, they hardly ever saw him. They communicated to him. he wrote the dissertation essentially he gave them complete chapters that they could be good in the dissertation because he didn't want to deal with you refer to a relation between professors and children it was a really hierarchical situation and I think that also that was reflected in the way Einstein received in Leiden Because, of course, they had these discussions with Einstein, Lawrence and Irofest, they discussed it with Einstein, and they took place at Irofest's house or at Lawrence's house. But in any case, at Lawrence's house, hardly anyone else was invited. It was unthinkable that students would be invited to participate. In Irofest's case, it was a little different. But then the discussions were more between Einstein and Irofest than between Lawrence's house. More informal, right? I would like to come back to the point of statistics, as Professor North told us, when you have done a statistic, quite a big statistic, on the relativistic literature, from physics abstracts, from all the years that the Guinness worked on, from the 15s up to the war. And you have two peaks, in fact. You have a peak in the 20s, and after that you have one other one in the 30s. It's cosmology there, and it's not something which is singular to Germany. It's something you can find in France and everywhere it seems. Well, that's my first point. And one point more concerning drafts on all the studies, for example, on fortune solution. You can find that it's something very singular in the manner that Wright-History are working on.

1:05:00 You find the same subject, but without, for example, on the trajectories of things like that, by Rob, by Fartin, by Dijon, some guys nobody knows. And it's a big work to be done, but without connections. Everyone who works in his own community without any connections with other people. Some people by draft have been translated, and you cannot say that it's a language problem only. It's quite a complicated problem. John? Going back to Arna Cox's paper, they were much dismayed about Ehrinfests, and it was the students at the Pakistanis at school. This was, to me, the obvious question. Ehrinfest was a very close friend of Iceland. They were cousin correspondents from about 1910, 1911 on. The correspondence concluded a lot about relativity. Amber Fisk did try to do something on the subject to talk about the Fiskline and Anzac Grossman a little bit before, when I had to do the static arbitration, because it was not a very successful paper. But anyway, he never seems to have returned against the relativity to publish. The obvious question is why, because he obviously was interested. And if he had, it would have been a Dutch school. I asked myself the same question. I don't know. I have no answer. I have no answer. Could it be maybe too much edible? Maybe he was intimidated by Lawrence's work. He was easily intimidated by Lawrence. He was almost permanently intimidated by Lawrence. And I think maybe he didn't want to touch that because he felt that Lawrence could do much, much better than he did. But Lawrence also wrote a part theory and that didn't seem to have an interest to work in that. Yeah, but I'm not sure if Lawrence's work of one theory is of the same quality as the work of general. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. To comment on this, the physical distance, again. In a mathematician, I mean, I'll read just an exact expression of the historical truth. And it seems to me that the difference between the general theory of verity and quantum theory, which was stressed when used to curve, might be the most Indian theory of the traffic, or what it turned out to be. That is what it is, where they are. Like, violence spoke in Germany, like Edmonton spoke in England, and that's what people really do. It wasn't an equal angle.

1:07:30 I think this is a very interesting question, and one might also extend this question to We'll come back to Kosta late, but his categories for what he called peripheral, what he called peripheral reception, are only valid for general relativity or whether or not in order to validate those categories, really compared to the study of the Muscatine mechanics is named. May I address the problem? It's true that most of the important 30-50 books have been before 1921. The writers books and the lawyers books and all the important books. And the peak is, I believe, mainly from more popular presentations of the country, not from monographs for interested visitors. In physics abstract, you have this pitch, it's clear, you have infiltrated on mathematics, If, maybe you can do that in more detail, but if you do that, if you think, hey, I did it from every source, and you have it, and you have one other more in the 30s, no problem from cosmology. Yeah, but is that really the relativist or the anti-relativist? I know, it's relativist. It's probably normal. Because I have many, many of these 60 books I have not yet included are on cosmology, and I just don't know how relevant they are or if they are popular, things like the world around us and so on. directly referring to Einstein's theory wasn't that the point that was just made surely altogether there was remarkably little work done on general relativity from about the early 20s and for very good reasons that it was so far removed from practical applications and things like that, I think working physicists had a very good sense this is an absolutely fascinating topic but there's nothing I can really contribute which can be tested I mean that surely explains why the Dutch school perhaps didn't flourish because there just really wasn't terribly much point for a sensible working scientist

1:10:00 to try and get some new results within the framework of general relativity that waited until the 50s surely, with certain exceptions. I have a question. What's the thing about I did not include this by purpose because there are papers by Kleinert on the correspondence of Kleinert and his position that I thought we had dealt quite a subject. I mean, as far as I understood China, Lennart was not, was friendly to Einstein before Einstein's public attack on him in the Berlin newspaper following this meeting of the anti-relativist where he attacked and that was the turning point on that point on the I'd like to make a general point which is that we have a really full contribution and a really full point to that namely the reference to You shall look at the end of Professor Goehner, on the one hand of the experiment. The first category goes into the broad spectrum of the reception of relativity in, you might say, the conceptual society at large, whereas the other two pages concentrate on the scientific reception. Well, even concentrating on the scientific perception, it would be interesting to know whether there were any scientific and relativistic papers, for instance, that you only mentioned. Presumably those were relativistic. And the other question would go to Professor Gunner, which is, but it would be very interesting to characterize the techniques that are developed in the scientific

1:12:30 opposition to the scientific I haven't come across any at least in the scientific literature any anti-historic reproducing I haven't one of the things I'm planning to do in the equator is to look at the more popular literature in Holland called Veldivision theory and maybe something will come up in that category that's clearly anti-Veldivision. I wanted to make some remarks but I dropped them because of time. My program is that I first want to get empirical data, that is how the external history went. in the history of ideas. That's why I didn't know about it first. Just one last quick question. I just want to make a very brief comment and I hope some of you are really looking to the influence of World War II on the reception. I want to mention two extremes which I noticed recently. One is, Eddington was a conscientious objector and the second time around when he was in danger of being drafted, particularly for the purpose of studying Einstein's theory in the context of the Eclipse, in spite of the world. The other extreme is that in Le Carre, Le Carre quotes the Belgian law which says that we are not allowed to quote from any energy. And he says, I'm ready to go to jail or something. And I have done this many times in this book. at this very point I should ask the public to split into fractions those who want to continue to discuss reception and those who want to have I personally do thank you Thank you.

1:15:00 Thank you.