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International scientific institutions are preferred settings to explore prominent topics in the transnational approaches to the recent history of science. These include: the dichotomy between universalism and contextualism in the historical evolution of exact sciences; the historical transformation of the ideals of scientific internationalism; the tensions between these historically changing ideals and scientists’ national allegiances; the balance between scientific and diplomatic activities of such institutions; and the issue of how the complex ideological, socio-political roles these institutions play affected the actual evolution of science.Inspired by these overreaching themes, the paper presents a conceptual framework for pursuing a comparative analysis of IAU and IUPAP. A bird’s-eye view of the parallel historical developments of these two unions shows that, in spite of their common origins in the highly politicized context of the post-WWI reconstruction of international cooperation, IAU and IUPAP followed diverging trajectories in many respects. It is argued that a deeper study of these differences might give important insights to properly understand the relevance of specific disciplines’ scientific needs in the way the ideals and practices of scientific internationalism were actualized through the 20th century.

The year 1968 is universally considered a watershed in history, as the world was experiencing an accelerated growth of anti-establishment protests that would have long-lasting impacts on the cultural, social, and political spheres of human life. On September 26, amid social and political unrest across the globe, 62 physicists gathered in Geneva to found the European Physical Society. Among these were the official representatives of the national physical societies of 18 countries in both Eastern and Western Europe, who signed the constitution in spite of the political divides of the Cold War. According to the main proponent of the society, Italian physicist Gilberto Bernardini, the success of the initiative was the realization of a dream: the institutional formation of a single community of European physicists, a representation of a culturally unified Europe that he described as a “single highly civilized nation.” The analysis of as yet unexplored archival materials of Bernardini and other protagonists in the establishment of the society has enabled an investigation of the historical development of science diplomacy in two interconnected ways: first, by elucidating how the actors involved, especially those in Western Europe, interpreted their role as diplomats amid particularly turbulent reconfigurations of international political relations; second, by interpreting the attempt to institutionalize transnational scientific networks with the establishment of a non-governmental organization as a tool to influence world political affairs. It will first be shown that the political ideal of a culturally unified Europe was deeply intertwined with the socio-professional interests of a specific community, mostly involved with CERN. I will argue that, in the process of establishing the society, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact armed forces led many of the Western physicists involved in this process to reframe the role of the European Physical Society as a tool to diffuse liberal-democratic values and to support political dissidents in Eastern Europe.

In the past years, a complex historical debate has emerged on the causes, origins, and manifestations of the process dubbed as the renaissance of Einstein’s theory of gravitation. After a thirty-year period of stagnation of the theory, known as its low-water-mark phase, the renaissance marks the post–World War II return of general relativity to the mainstream of physics. As an introduction to The Renaissance of General Relativity in Context, we discuss the various historical hypotheses that have been advanced and put them in dialogue with the chapters published in the volume. In discussing these studies, we argue that our previous interpretation of the renaissance process (as resulting from the interplay of social and epistemic factors) has been substantially confirmed. In addition, these studies enable our interpretation of the renaissance of general relativity to be redefined as a two-step process. A first phase of theoretical renaissance, driven by social transformations, occurred between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s and transformed the general theory of relativity into a bona fide physical theory. The second phase of this process, which we call the astrophysical turn, was an experiment-driven shift toward relativistic astrophysics and physical cosmology and was strongly related to discoveries in the astrophysical domain in the 1960s.

The history of general relativity presents intriguing challenges for historians and philosophers of science. Its origins and receptions have figured prominently in debates about conceptual transformations, the dynamics of theory change, relationships between theory and experiment and, of course, physical and philosophical notions of space and time.

The term “science diplomacy” broadly identifies interactions between scientific and foreign policy communities connected to the promotion of international scientific exchanges (also as a way to establish constructive relations between countries), and the provision of scientific advice on issues of relevance to more than one nation. Science diplomacy initiatives have been positively portrayed by practitioners, while recent scholarship has underscored the need for these actions to more directly address social and global challenges. In what follows we sketch the contours of a data-driven “science diplomacy 2.0” that could actually be seen as more directly tackling these challenges in two important ways. First, we outline a multi-layered approach that integrates data and meta-data from various disciplines in order to promote greater awareness about what kind of research should actually be prioritized in science diplomacy actions. Second, we argue for the creation of responsible innovation observatories for operationalizing such a methodology at both national and global levels.

This paper presents a novel methodology for defining and analyzing the dynamics of the collaboration networks of scientists working on general relativity from the mid-1920s–1970. During these four and a half decades the status of the theory underwent a radical transformation: from a marginal theory before the mid-1950s to a pillar of modern physics. To investigate this passage—known as the renaissance of general relativity—we used a definition of collaboration networks broader than the co-authorship relations retrievable from online datasets. We constructed a multilayer network, in which each layer represents a different kind of collaboration. After having analyzed the evolution over time of specific parameters of the co-authorship network, we investigated the effects of adding one type of collaboration edge at a time, in a cumulative fashion, on the values of these parameters and on the topology of the collaboration network through time, including rapid shifts in the dynamic evolution of the largest component. This analysis provides robust quantitative evidence that a shift in the structure of the relativity collaboration network occurred between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, when a giant component started forming. We interpret this shift as the central social dynamic of the renaissance process and then identify its central actors. Our analysis disproves common explanations of the renaissance process. It shows that this phenomenon was not a consequence of astrophysical discoveries in the 1960s, nor was it a simple by-product of socio-economic transformations in the physics landscape after World War II.

We report the results of our analysis of the development of general relativity between 1925 and 1970 based on the conceptual and methodological framework of socio-epistemic networks comprised of three different layers: social, semiotic, and semantic. Our computational approach is used to uncover the mechanism of the passage between the low-water-mark phase of general relativity—roughly from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s—and the so-called renaissance of the theory after the mid-1950s. Based on this multilayer analysis, we provide substantial empirical evidence that between the second half of the 1950s and the early 1960s there was an evident shift in all three layers. Our analysis disproves common explanations of the renaissance process. It shows that this phenomenon was not a consequence of astrophysical discoveries in the 1960s, nor was it a simple by-product of socio-economic transformations in the physics landscape after World War II. We argue instead that the renaissance has to be understood as a two-phase process both at the social and at the epistemic level. The first occurred between the second half of the 1950s and the early 1960s, when a growing community of physicists redirected their interest toward physical problems in general relativity, while the previous period was characterized by a dispersion of research agendas aimed at substituting the theory with a different and more general one. We call this first phase the theoretical renaissance general relativity. The second phase, which we call the astrophysical turn, was instead an experiment-driven process that started with the discovery of quasars and was characterized by the emergence of relativistic astrophysics and physical cosmology as well as the early phases of gravitational-wave astronomy.

The recent discovery of gravitational waves is often seen as the confirmation of a prediction Einstein made one century ago. We argue instead that only after conceptual advances in general relativity between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s could such a prediction be made on the basis of unambiguous notions shared by a community of specialists. The conceptual transformation and the reorganization of knowledge related to general relativity that characterized this post-Second World War period can be used to properly understand the hitherto vaguely defined ‘renaissance of general relativity’. During its first phase, theoreticians took a conservative turn by refocusing on general relativity, after previously having worked on other research agendas mostly targeted at substituting general relativity with a superior theory. This turn was followed by a second phase that was characterized by a plurality of approaches to general relativity, which had in common the fact that they were able to develop intrinsically (generally) relativistic concepts, in particular radiation, rather than using other theories as an interpretative crutch.

A definitive historical study of the review article is yet to be written, but recent advances in the history of scientific publishing provide a better understanding of its emergence and transformations in a broader context. Roberto Lalli discusses review articles in physics, by looking at the historical evolution of this scientific genre. The review article has a rich history and Roberto Lalli tells the story of how this scientific genre evolved in physics.

This book is a snapshot of the ether qua epistemic object in the early twentieth century. It shows that the ether was not necessarily regarded as the residue of old-fashioned science, but often as one of the objects of modernity, hand in hand with the electron, radioactivity or X-rays. Instrumental in this was the emergence of wireless technologies and radio broadcasting, which brought the ether into social audiences who would otherwise have never heard about it. Following the prestige of scientists like Oliver Lodge and Arthur Eddington as popularisers of science, the ether became common currency among the general educated public. Modernism in the arts was also fond of the ether in the early twentieth century: the values of modernism found in the complexities and contradictions of modern physics provided a fertile ground for the development of new artistic languages, in literature as much as in the pictorial and performing arts. The question of what was meant by ‘ether’ (or ‘aether’) in the early twentieth century at the scientific and cultural levels is also central to this book. The chapters in this book display a complex array of meanings that will help elucidate the uses of the ether before its purported abandonment. Rather than considering ether as simply a term that remained popular in several groups, this book shows the complexities of an epistemic object that saw, in the early twentieth century, the last episode in the long tradition of stretching its meaning and uses.

This chapter re-examines the view widely held by physicists that the luminiferous ether became an outdated concept in the early twentieth century and that Albert Einstein’s special relativity killed it. A second common narrative is that the null result of the 1887 Michelson–Morley ether-drift experiment led to Einstein’s theory and the demise of the ether. On the basis of these two simplified narratives, it has become part of the physicists’ ‘imagined past’ that the Michelson–Morley experiment provided the key evidence decreeing the end of the ether. Using scientometrics, this chapter argues that the first part of this idealised narrative is misleading and that the two parts of this narrative are deeply intertwined, as both had historical roots in the reception of Einstein’s relativity theories. In this perspective, the well-known episode of Dayton C. Miller’s repetition of the Michelson–Morley experiment in the 1920s appears in a new light.

The complex landscape of the scientific institutions operating at the international level in the post-World War II period is outlined here. Around the mid-1950s, when the community-building activities connected to general relativity first began, a reconfiguration of these institutions for the promotion and organization of international cooperation in science was under way. The motivations for, and constraints of, this transformation were defined by the world order that was being constructed after the end of World War II and by the evolution of the Cold War. For those willing to create a new structure for promoting general relativity in the international arena, these existing institutions provided both a model to follow and a larger established structure with which to interact. It is argued that one of the major structural changes in institutions such as the International Unions was that they began promoting specific areas of research at this point, while before World War II their role was limited to define international standards. Besides these structural changes in scientific institutions, the second major element was the changing political context related to the post-Stalinist reforms in the Soviet Union and the related detente in international relations that led to an increasing participation of Soviet scientists in international scientific institutions.

This chapter focuses on the period between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, regarded as the maturity phase of the “General Relativity and Gravitation” community. During this phase, many tensions of different kinds emerged and seriously jeopardized the existence of an institutional structure for promoting general relativity at the international level. These tensions ranged from cultural differences to generational struggles, from disciplinary rivalries to political conflicts. All of them became urgent matters of debate when the international conference held in the Soviet Union in September 1968 was dramatically affected by the recent military conflicts of the Six-Day War and of the armed invasion of Czechoslovakia. Under strained political circumstances, scientists attempted to draw a clear boundary between scientific and political matters. In the attempt to do so, the participants came to hold very different views about how these demarcations should be defined in the specific context of the activities of an international scientific institution during the Cold War. Despite the various conflicts, the institution was able to survive: this period ended with the transformation of the International Committee on General Relativity and Gravitation into the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation—whose statute came to embody the political and other tensions characterizing its establishment.

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This chapter presents a general historiographical framework for interpreting the renaissance of general relativity as a consequence of the interplay between internal and environmental factors. The internal factors refer to the resilient theoretical framework provided by general relativity to physicists working in diverse and dispersed fields. The external factors relate to the changing working conditions of physicists in the post-World War II period, with the newly created conditions for the mobility of young researchers, for the transfer of knowledge in a growing international community, and for the self-organization of an identifiable community. These external factors created a favorable environment for integrating the dispersed research endeavors under the new heading of “General Relativity and Gravitation” research. This, in turn, provided the conditions for the emergence of a coherent investigation of the theoretical core of general relativity for its own sake and for the creation of a community specifically dedicated to this goal.

This chapter analyzes the first decade of the process of building the community of “relativists” from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. This period can be seen as the formative phase of the emerging community, during which the initial steps were taken to institutionally unify the different research agendas under the heading of “General Relativity and Gravitation.” These included the organization of the first international conference on general relativity held in Bern in 1955, the establishment of the International Committee on General Relativity in Gravitation in 1959, and the decision to publish the Bulletin on General Relativity and Gravitation from 1962 onward. It is argued that some of the initial impetus to build the international community was related to idealistic views about the role of science in achieving peaceful relations between nations. By the end of the formative phase, however, many tensions of both a political and epistemic nature came to dominate the discussions about the future of the committee as it had to face sudden changes in the social composition of the community as well as in the redefinition of the field after the discovery of quasars in 1963 and the emergence of relativistic astrophysics.

In the 1930s the mathematical physicist Howard P. Robertson was the main referee of the journal Physical Review for papers concerning general relativity and related subjects. The rich correspondence between Robertson and the editors of the journal enables a historical investigation of the refereeing process of Physical Review at the time that it was becoming one of the most influential physics periodicals in the world. By focusing on this case study, the paper investigates two complementary aspects of the evolution of the refereeing process: first, the historical evolution of the refereeing practices in connection with broader contextual changes, and second, the attempts to define the activity of the referee, including the epistemic virtues required and the journal's functions according to the participants' categories. By exploring the tension between Robertson's idealized picture about how the referee should behave and the desire to promote his intellectual agenda, I show that the evaluation criteria that Robertson employed were contextually dependent and I argue that, in the 1930s, through his reports the referee had an enormous power in defining what direction future research should take.

Between 1937 and 1953 the industrial physicist Herbert E. Ives pursued an extended research program with the aim of challenging the acceptance of relativity theories, and became the most important American opponent of Einstein during that era. As part of his anti-relativistic efforts Ives also performed the famous Ives-Stilwell experiment. Usually interpreted as the first direct confirmation of the time dilation formula of special relativity theory, this experiment was regarded by Ives as proof of what he called the Larmor-Lorentz theory. Ives’s heterodox views about relativity were mainly ignored by the scientific community during his lifetime. After his death, however, his criticisms of what the majority of physicists took for granted helped spark philosophical discussions in the late 1950s concerning the conventional stipulation of distant simultaneity in special relativity theory. Ives’s anti-relativistic beliefs and actions allow for an analysis of the heterodox efforts of an accredited member of the scientific community and the subsequent process of his professional marginalization in a specific historical and scientific context. This paper has three aims: to uncover the epistemic roots of Ives’s opposition to relativity; to analyze Ives’s rhetorical strategies and the reasons why he failed to persuade his peers; and to reveal the divergence between the public network of allies Ives built in scientific publications and the hidden network of allies present in his correspondence. It will become clear that the hardening of Ives’s tone against relativity and Einstein can be understood in light of his progressive marginalization and loss of recognized socioprofessional identity due to his unorthodox ideas. Ives’s case is illuminating for the historical, philosophical, and sociological perspectives it provides on the complex mechanisms by which the margins interact with the mainstream of science, both in the production of certified knowledge and in the contextually contingent redefinition and reconfiguration of the boundaries of acceptable scientific discourse.

The history of the theory of general relativity presents unique features. After its discovery, the theory was immediately confirmed and rapidly changed established notions of space and time. The further implications of general relativity, however, remained largely unexplored until the mid 1950s, when it came into focus as a physical theory and gradually returned to the mainstream of physics. This essay presents a historiographical framework for assessing the history of general relativity by taking into account in an integrated narrative intellectual developments, epistemological problems, and technological advances; the characteristics of post-World War II and Cold War science; and newly emerging institutional settings. It argues that such a framework can help us understand this renaissance of general relativity as a result of two main factors: the recognition of the untapped potential of general relativity and an explicit effort at community building, which allowed this formerly disparate and dispersed field to benefit from the postwar changes in the scientific landscape.

Karl K. Darrow was a central actor in the reception of quantum theory in the Bell Telephone Laboratories. He was the first industrial physicist to dedicate his entire working time to the dissemination of novel concepts and theoretical tools by means of long review papers. The present paper analyzes the evolution of Darrow’s narratives of quantum theory and shows that Darrow’s reviews aimed at substantiating the view that physics was an evolutionary process. The paper argues that this view was connected to Darrow’s peculiar activity at the Bell Labs as well as to the contemporaneous attempts of leading American scientists to build an ideology of national science.

Summary This paper analyses documents from several US archives in order to examine the controversy that raged within the US scientific community over Dayton C. Miller's ether-drift experiments. In 1925, Miller announced that his repetitions of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment had shown a slight but positive result: an ether-drift of about 10 kilometres per second. Miller's discovery triggered a long debate in the US scientific community about the validity of Einstein's relativity theories. Between 1926 and 1930 some researchers repeated the Michelson-Morley experiment, but no one found the same effect as Miller had. The inability to confirm Miller's result, paired with the fact that no other ether theory existed that could compete with special relativity theory, made his result an enigmatic one. It thus remained of little interest to the scientific community until 1954, when Robert S. Shankland and three colleagues reanalysed the data and proposed that Miller's periodic fringe shift could be attribu...