The Fock-Infeld Dispute: An Illustration of the Renaissance of General Relativity in the Soviet Union
In 1938, Einstein, Infeld, and Hoffmann contributed to the problem of motion in general relativity by establishing approximate equations for several particles of comparable masses. A year later, the exact same problem was also solved independently by the
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1 Introduction Physicists discussed the problem of the motion of bodies in the theory of general relativity extensively throughout the twentieth century. In his 1989 paper on “The Early History of the ‘Problem of Motion’ in General Relativity,” Peter Havas summarized its birth as follows: [ . . . ] in the case of the absence of any nongravitational fields, Einstein postulated (in the initial 1913 form of the theory and its final 1916 form) that the motion of a mass point should follow a geodesic in four-dimensional space-time. [ . . . ] The geodesic law was taken to be exact for a test particle, i.e., a particle that is subject to the effects of a gravitational field, but whose own effect on the field can be neglected, so that the “force” acting on the particle was determined by solving Einstein’s field equation in the absence of the particle. Whether the geodesic law also holds for a particle whose effects on the gravitational field cannot be neglected was not discussed initially. It was clear, however, that for the case of several bodies of comparable masses Einstein’s (nonlinear) field equations could not be expected to permit an exact solution and thus no universal force law analogous to Newton’s law of gravitation could be hoped for, but only an approximate one, which in the lowest order should agree with Newton’s (Havas 1989, 235).
As a direct consequence of the need for an approximation, the problem of motion remained discussed during the period defined by Jean Eisenstaedt (1986, 1989) as the “low water mark” of general relativity.1 The first major achievement in this
1 See
also Chap. 1 in this volume for a historiographical discussion of the “low water mark” of general relativity. J.-P. Martinez () Institute for Theoretical Particle Physics and Cosmology, RWTH Aachen University, Sommerfeldstr, Aachen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. S. Blum et al. (eds.), The Renaissance of General Relativity in Context, Einstein Studies 16, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50754-1_4
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direction is generally attributed to Einstein and Grommer (1927).2 They contributed to the recognition that in general relativity the laws of motion cannot be specified independently of the field equations. The subsequent derivation of approximate equations of motion for several particles of comparable masses is commonly ascribed to Einstein, Infeld, and Hoffmann (1938) in their paper “Gravitational Equations and the Problem of Motion.”3 A year later, in 1939, the exact same problem was also solved independently by the Soviet physicist Vladimir Fock, who published his results in Russian and French (Fock 1939a, b).4 However, his approach proved to be different from that of the trio. It laid the foundations for an interpretation of general relativity which turned out to be different from Einstein’s, and, for this reason, Fock came into direct confrontation with Leopold Infeld in the course of his career. Vladimir Fock (1898–1974) is nowadays a familiar name
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