Chapel Hill Conference
The Conference on the Role of Gravitation in Physics, also known as the Chapel Hill Conference, was an invitation-only scientific conference held at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States from January 18 to January 23, 1957. It discussed experimental proposals to tfind gravitational waves and discussed ways to find a theory of quantum gravity. It was also one of the first large conferences to discuss the many-worlds interpretation.
Organization
The conference was organized by the Institute of Field Physics established a year before the conference in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by physicists Cécile DeWitt-Morette and Bryce DeWitt.[1] The institute was financed by bussinessmen Agnew Bahson and Roger Babson.[1] The later had founded the Gravity Research Foundation for looking into anti-gravity research.[1]
Aside from the DeWitts, in the steering comittee there was also Frederik Belinfante, Peter Bergmann, Freeman Dyson and John Archibald Wheeler.[1]
Energy of gravitational waves
During the conference, the nature of gravitational waves and their ability to transfer energy was discussed. Richard Feynman remembers [2]
I was surprised to find a whole day at the conference devoted to this question, and that ‘experts’ were confused. That is what comes from looking for conserved energy tensors, etc. instead of asking ‘can the waves do work?
Feynman suggested during the conference the sticky bead argument which intuitively demonstrated that gravitational waves must carry energy.[2] This argument was published by Hermann Bondi right after the conference.[2]
List of participants
- From United States:
- James Leroy Anderson (born 1926)
- Valentine Bargmann
- Robert W. Bass (born 1930)
- Frederik Belinfante
- Peter Bergmann
- Dieter R. Brill (born 1933)
- Michael J. Buckingham (born 1933)
- William R. Davis
- Bryce DeWitt
- Cécile DeWitt-Morette
- Robert H. Dicke
- Frederick J. Ernst (born 1932)
- Richard Feynman
- Thomas Gold
- Joshua N. Goldberg
- Arthur Lilley (born 1928)
- Richard W. Lindquist
- Charles W. Misner
- Raymond Mjolsness
- Ezra T. Newman
- Alfred Schild
- Ralph S. Schiller
- Joseph Weber
- John Archibald Wheeler
- Louis Witten
- From United Kingdom:
- From France:
- From Germany:
- From Japan:
- From Denmark:
- From Sweden
- From Turkey
References
- ^ a b c d DeWitt, Cécile M.; Dicke, Dean, eds. (2017). The Role of Gravitation in Physics: Report from 1957 Chapel Hill Conference. Edition Open Access.
- ^ a b c Preskill, John and Kip S. Thorne. Foreword to Feynman Lectures On Gravitation. Feynman et al. (Westview Press; 1st ed. (June 20, 2002) p. xxv–xxvi.Link PDF (page 17-18)