The mathematicians' happy hunting ground: Einstein's general theory of relativity (Q1889966)

The author discusses the influence of Albert Einstein's special relativity and, to a much greater extent, general relativity on mathematics. Mathematicians were more enthusiastic about general relativity than physicists. While two leading theoreticians in Berlin, Max von Laue and Max Planck were skeptical (later they changed their attitude and became strong supporters), many leading mathematicians (for example, Hermann Weyl and David Hilbert) were of very high opinion of Einstein's discoveries. After Karl Schwarzschild gave the first exact solution of Einstein's equations, mathematicians became even more interested. Influence of general relativity on differential geometry played role in Einstein moving to the US. Princeton's senior mathematician L.~P. Eisenhart, a renowned geometer, invited Einstein to Princeton for a semester. Einstein declined this offer but when, early in 1920, Kurt Blumenfeld persuaded him to come to the US to support the Zionist movement and raise funds for Hebrew University, Einstein reconsidered Eisenhart's invitation. Einstein had a group of enemies in the US. Controversies around his theories spilled to US from Germany after Philipp Lenard accused Einstein of appropriating earlier results of Georg Soldner. Eisenhart, Hilbert, Born and other people supported Einstein. Dr. A. Reuterdahl who came to the US from Sweden and eventually became President of Ramsay Institute of Technology in St. Paul was a regular contributor to Henry Ford's newspaper ``The Dearborn Independent'' remembered for its blatantly anti-Semitic editorials. Reuterdahl regularly inveighed against the followers of Einstein as corruptors of scientific truth. \textit{Reviewer's remark.} Germany and the US were not the only countries where Einstein's contributions were disregarded in certain circles. My teacher V.~V. Wagner [Vagner] told me how he wanted to study general relativity. In the early 1930s he came to Igor Tamm, a leading Soviet physicist, because he wanted to be a graduate student of Tamm. Tamm talked to Wagner, examined him, and then said that the government forbade him to take graduate students in this field because `the victorious proletariat did not need relativity.' Instead, he was ordered to take graduate students in `physics of metals,' a field that the proletariat needed. Said Tamm: ``I am older than you and can wait until this idiocy disappears but you can't because you are young and these are your best years. They think they can tell us, the physicists, what to do. Yet even they still have some scruples remaining and don't think that they know mathematics better than mathematician. So the atmosphere is a somewhat better in mathematics. It is still possible to study relativity from the geometric point of view. Go to differential geometry.'' Tamm called V.~F.~Kagan, a famous Soviet geometer, and asked him to help a bright young man who wanted to study relativity. This was how Wagner became a geometer.