THE IMPACT OF WORLD WAR I ON RELATIVITY PART I

From an astronomical and relativistic point of view, the Great War began with the August, 1914 capture and imprisonment of the members of a German eclipse expedition that had gone to the Crimea to look, at the request of Einstein, for bending of starlight by the sun.And it ended in 1919 with the Eddington-inspired measurements of that light bending from Principe and Sobral and with the founding of the International Astronomical Union by scientists from "the countries at war with the Central Powers."In between came unprecedented, and in some ways unequaled, death and destruction.The scientists lost were mostly too young to have made an impact (Henry Moseley and Karl Schwarzschild are exceptions), but many of the best-known of the next generation had, if citizens of the belligerent countries, served on the battle lines, and most of the rest contributed in some other way.It may come as a surprise to find that both theoretical physics and observational astronomy of relevance to general relativity continued to take place and that there was a certain amount of communication of results, information, and even goods in both directions.The early post-war years saw something of a flowering of the subject, before the majority of physicists turned their attention to quantum mechanics and astronomers to stellar physics, though both had already been under consideration during the war.War-based bitterness between French and German scholars was surely part of the context in which Einstein and Henri Bergson faced off on 6 April 1922, in a debate on the nature of time, as part of an Einsteinian visit to Paris that had originally been planned for Fall, 1914. Those eclipse expeditions and how I came to the projectMany years ago, I investigated whether scientific papers had grown monotonically longer more or less forever (the answer was a qualified yes) 5 .This was somehow in mind early in 2011 when I walked past the library shelves of Nature and noticed how skinny the volumes had become through the years 1915-19.A ha! Thought I: I wonder how else World War I shows up there.So I picked up the first August, 1914 issue and started to read, eventually examining every page 1914-19 and later back to 1908 and forward to 1923.Within a couple of issues, there was the report of a Berlin eclipse expedition to the Crimea under Erwin Freundlich having been captured and imprisoned.Paul Halpern 6 tells us more about the background, and issues of Sirius * and Nature more about the outcome.World War II has been called the physicists' war (meaning radar, rockets, and fission bombs) and World War I the chemists' war (poison gases, of course, but also urgent need, in the face of various blockades, for nitrogen fixation, synthetic rubber and petroleum, dye stuffs, optical glass, and much else).Not surprisingly, in fact, no part of science, technology, or engineering came through either war unaffected.A handful of items that do not belong to us here include the first (accidentally) placebo-controlled test of vaccination (for typhoid fever), demonstration that round craters could come from oblique impacts, the first aircraft carrier, reluctant welcoming of women into industrial labs and production facilities, and a brief moment when Canada had the world's largest telescope.I have spoken about many such items at meetings on physics, chemistry, and astronomy, and hope some day to get it all on paper (or whatever anybody might be reading by then).This is the second installment.The first, "Who got Moseley's Prize?" (meaning the Nobel he had been nominated for in 1915 just before he was shot at Gallipoli, and the answer is Charles Barkla), is in an American Chemical Society book 7 .

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