The Role of Gravitation in Physics: Report from the 1957 Chapel Hill Conference

This book contains the original report from the Conference on the Role of Gravitation in Physics, which took place at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, over six days in 1957. The report was taken down by Cécile DeWitt and several other “reporters,” as part of a conference funding agreement with the Wright Air Development Center, a U.S. Army (Air Force) funding body (the report's ‘official’ designation is: WADC Technical Report 57-216). Cécile DeWitt then edited the recorded material into its final form. The report, though publicly available as a government document, has not previously been published in book form, and there are not many copies of the report left in existence. Given the immense historical significance of the conference - giving gravitational research some much needed impetus at a time when it was in a state of dire neglect - we thought it was high time to produce a version of the report ‘for the masses’ as it were. The version presented here is almost entirely faithful to the original, and aside from the correction of a few spelling mistakes (and the possible addition of some entirely new typos!) features no substantive alterations or annotations. However, in order to make the document more navigable and more useful as a research tool, we have added an index (of both names and subjects) and also imposed a little more structure on the sessions, by setting some of the meatier contributions as chapters. This in no way interferes with the ordering, and simply amounts to the addition, in several places, of a title to the presentations and discussions that follow.