Peter Bergmann

• 1. Introduction

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  Peter Gabriel Bergmann was born in Berlin on the 24th of March 1915, into a family that would scatter across the globe under the weight of Nazi persecution. His father Max was a biochemist who later became a professor at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. His mother Emmy was a pediatrician. By the time Bergmann turned 18, the world he had grown up in was already closing its doors. What drove a teenager from Berlin to Prague, from Prague to Princeton, and ultimately to building one of the first centers of general relativity research in the United States? And how did a letter his mother wrote to a physicist hiding in Belgium set the course of modern gravitational science?

• 2. Flight and Formation

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  Bergmann began college in 1931 at the age of 16 at Technische Hochschule, now known as TU Dresden, under the mentorship of Harry Dember. His instincts pulled toward theoretical physics rather than the laboratory bench. He moved to Freiburg and attended lectures by Gustav Mie before setting his sights on the University of Berlin.

  The inauguration of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in 1933 changed that plan immediately. Bergmann recognized that as a Jew, his academic future in Germany was finished. He crossed into Czechoslovakia and enrolled at the German University in Prague. There, under the direction of Philipp Frank, he completed his PhD by the age of 21, in 1936.

  The human cost of that exile was permanent. His sister Clara stayed behind in Germany. She was ultimately murdered at Auschwitz. The rest of the family scattered to different corners of the world, a pattern familiar to countless Jewish intellectuals during those years. It was Frank who would later recommend Bergmann as a research assistant to Einstein, a connection that would define his career.

• 3. Einstein's Collaborator

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  The partnership between Bergmann and Einstein began in a way Bergmann did not even know about at first. In 1933, while Einstein was hiding from the Nazis in Belgium, Bergmann's mother wrote him a letter asking if her son could work under him as a doctoral candidate. Einstein declined directly but suggested Bergmann study with Wolfgang Pauli instead.

  Bergmann contacted Einstein himself in 1935 and arrived in the United States the following year. He worked with Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, from October 1936 to June 1941. Their shared project was a unified field theory, an attempt to bring together Einstein's general relativity and Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism under a single theoretical roof.

  They pursued what is known as the Kaluza-Klein theory, a five-dimensional framework, and published two joint papers. The second of those papers included a third collaborator, Valentin Bargmann. By the 1940s, though, Einstein had stepped back from the Kaluza-Klein approach. The theory predicted a mass for the electron that was off by a factor of 10 to the power of 18, a disagreement with experiment so extreme it could not be ignored.

• 4. War Work and the Path to Syracuse

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  After leaving Princeton in 1941, Bergmann spent a year teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He moved to Lehigh University in Pennsylvania from 1942 to 1944. Then the war pulled him in a different direction entirely.

  From 1944 to 1947, Bergmann worked on research for the United States Navy, studying the propagation of sound underwater. He worked at Columbia University and at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, a detour into applied physics that had nothing to do with gravity or spacetime.

  When that work ended in 1947, Bergmann joined Syracuse University in New York State. He became a full professor there in 1953 and stayed for 35 years. Over that time he supervised 32 doctoral students, among them Joel Lebowitz, Ezra T. Newman, and Rainer K. Sachs, names that would each go on to leave their own marks on theoretical physics.

• 5. Rebuilding General Relativity

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  In 1947, no physics department in the United States maintained a research center dedicated to general relativity. Graduate programs did not require knowledge of it for qualifying exams, and few offered courses on it at all. Einstein's theory of gravity was, in the practical landscape of American academia, almost absent.

  Bergmann changed that at Syracuse. He built one of the first research centers in the country focused on general relativity and on the problem of reconciling it with quantum theory. A 1949 paper outlined the goals of his program and introduced the key ideas of non-perturbative canonical general relativity. He worked across general covariance, canonical quantum gravity, and relativistic statistical mechanics, and became a pioneer of constrained Hamiltonian dynamics, introducing the framework of primary and secondary constraints into mechanics.

  Bergmann and his students were the dominant contributors to the general relativity literature through the mid-1950s. He also helped shape the field institutionally, serving as one of the principal organizers of the inaugural Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics, held in Dallas in 1963. That symposium marked the moment general relativity entered the mainstream of physics research in the United States.

• 6. Textbooks and Legacy

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  In 1942, Bergmann published Introduction to the Theory of Relativity, the first textbook on general relativity written in English. Einstein himself wrote the foreword and predicted, correctly, that the teaching of relativity would expand. The book was studied extensively through the mid-twentieth century, translated into multiple languages, and reissued by Dover Publications in a second edition in 1976.

  The text is organized around geometry and motion in curved spacetime, following the approach of Einstein, Arthur Stanley Eddington, and Richard Chace Tolman. It covers special relativity, general relativity, and unified field theories in three parts, though it does not address the Minkowski spacetime formulation or the cosmological implications of the theory.

  Bergmann's other books included The Riddle of Gravitation, Basic Theories of Physics published by Prentice Hall in 1951, and a volume on Einstein's influence on physics, philosophy, and politics co-authored with Peter C. Aichelburg and Roman Ulrich Sexl. His influence also reached into unexpected places: when physicist Edward P. Tryon published a 1973 paper in Nature asking whether the universe could be a vacuum fluctuation, Tryon credited Bergmann with explaining how the universe could have begun with zero net energy.

• 7. Recognition and Final Years

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  After retiring from Syracuse in 1982, Bergmann accepted a visiting professorship at New York University, a position he held until he died. There he worked alongside his close friend, physicist Engelbert Schucking, co-organizing a seminar on relativity that ran until illness forced him to stop.

  The Albert Einstein Society in Switzerland awarded him the Albert Einstein Medal in 1992. Then, in 2002, shortly before his death, word reached him that he and John Archibald Wheeler had won the inaugural Einstein Prize from the American Physical Society. The citation honored their pioneering investigations in general relativity, covering gravitational radiation, black holes, spacetime singularities, symmetries in Einstein's equations, and their leadership across generations of researchers.

  Bergmann died in Seattle, Washington. He carried an Erdos number of 2, through a chain running from Ernst G. Straus to Paul Erdos. The Einstein Prize he shared with Wheeler was the first time that award was ever given.