La relativité générale à l'étiage: 1925-1955. (The ''drought'' of general relativity: 1925-1955) (Q1073003)

This long article is mainly concerned with the very extensive (lasting for over thirty years) and rather ''extremely curious period of its history'', ''a sort of desert crossing'' which Einstein's ''general theory of relativity'' underwent after some ten years, counted from the year 1915, of its first announcement: from the middle of the twenties until the end of the fifties. The author searches for an elucidation of such a curious historical phenomenon, taking into account the enormous reputation the name of Einstein already enjoyed at this time: beyond (and generally well known) the ''only trump of 43'' of arc for a century'', accounting for the advance in the perihelion of Mercury, the rather lesser convincing tests (from the error appreciation standpoint) regarding the deflection of light rays which pass near the sun, and the red shift of spectral lines of light originating in dense stars: ''the weak empirical fecundity of general relativity''. Consequently, it represented actually a ''shock - and the expectation'' - when in 1960 the experiment of Pound and Rebka was able to verify, within a precision of 1 \%, the ''third test'', concerning the ''red shift'' mentioned above. The author also analyzes what he calls the ''Newtonian domination'', the ''alternative (concurrent) theories'', the ''cosmological'' implications, as well as Einstein's ''unified field theory'' of gravitation and electromagnetism, which however exhibits little convincing power. To all these merits (including the epistemological as well as the aesthetic ones) and vicissitudes, the author yet adds Einstein's celebrated rejection of the so-called ''Copenhague Interpretation'' of Quantum mechanics. Last but not least, pounders the mathematical aspects of Einstein's general relativity, the ''principle of covariance'', as well as the panic induced in the minds of many physicists in the presence of the announcement that henceforth they must be acquainted with ''tensor theory''. The end of the article is rather dramatic, describing the social loneliness of Einstein and the relativists in their confinement within an ''ivory tower''. At Princeton: ''Sie glauben, ich bin ein alter Trottel'': ''They believe I am an old imbecile'', an attitude which persisted without change until Einstein's death in 1955.... But the final conclusion of the author is by far not so pessimistic for the future: ''les relativistes vont désormais pouvoir vivre de la relativité générale et non plus seulement pour la théorie d'Einstein''.