Questions about Peter Bergmann
Short answers, pulled from the story.
Who was Peter Bergmann and why is he significant in physics?
Peter Gabriel Bergmann (the 24th of March 1915 - the 19th of October 2002) was a German-American physicist known for his collaboration with Albert Einstein on unified field theory and for reviving general relativity research in the United States after World War II. He established one of the first academic research centers devoted to general relativity at Syracuse University and introduced primary and secondary constraints into constrained Hamiltonian dynamics.
How did Peter Bergmann come to work with Albert Einstein?
Bergmann's mother wrote a letter to Einstein in 1933 while Einstein was hiding from the Nazis in Belgium, asking if her son could work under him. Einstein suggested Bergmann study with Wolfgang Pauli instead. Bergmann contacted Einstein again in 1935, and on the recommendation of Philipp Frank, began working with Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in October 1936.
What did Peter Bergmann and Einstein work on together at Princeton?
From October 1936 to June 1941, Bergmann and Einstein worked on a unified field theory aimed at combining general relativity with Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism. They pursued the Kaluza-Klein theory and published two joint papers, with Valentin Bargmann joining the second. The Kaluza-Klein approach was later abandoned because its predicted electron mass was off by a factor of 10 to the power of 18.
What textbook did Peter Bergmann write and why was it important?
In 1942, Bergmann published Introduction to the Theory of Relativity, the first general relativity textbook of its kind, with a foreword by Einstein. It was studied extensively during the mid-twentieth century, translated into multiple languages, and reissued by Dover Publications in a second edition in 1976. The book covers special relativity, general relativity, and unified field theories, with an emphasis on geometry and motion in curved spacetime.
What award did Peter Bergmann win from the American Physical Society?
Shortly before his death in 2002, Bergmann and John Archibald Wheeler won the inaugural Einstein Prize from the American Physical Society. The award honored their pioneering investigations in general relativity, including work on gravitational radiation, black holes, spacetime singularities, and symmetries in Einstein's equations, and their leadership to generations of researchers.
What did Peter Bergmann do to revive general relativity research in the United States?
In 1947, no U.S. physics department had a research center for general relativity, and most graduate programs neither offered courses on it nor tested for it. Bergmann founded one of the first such research centers at Syracuse University, where he worked from 1947 to 1982, supervised 32 doctoral students, and helped organize the inaugural Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics in Dallas in 1963.