Remo Ruffini at 80:
My Fifty Years Orbiting Remo's World Line? [1972-2022]
bob jantzen May 17, 2022 [and
Happy DayAfter Birthday Roy!
!!]
[browse this hyperlinked trip down memory lane yourself at bottom right corner of my
"Robert
Jantzen Villanova" webpage]
GR: mathematical foundations?
bob reviews his hard to characterize junior partnership with a unique
personality in the evolution of relativistic astrophysics,
which began EXACTLY 50 years ago! [I am 10 years minus 1 month behind]
[20 years ago I covered our first 30 years at
RJR 60 [group
photo] [Wimmer
BH painting]
Caught in the Relativity Web: My 30 Years Near Remo's World Line]
bob is the unofficial (people) historian of
G9/ICRA/ICRANet
and fills out Demetri's half hour slot liberated due to his post-COVID complications.
Remo has had a talent for attracting very interesting
people to his evolving relativistic astrophysics circle, and I have been able to
meet many of them over the years.
The time line:
- 1960-1975: "golden age of general relativity" [wiki]
[Remo at Princeton: 1967-1974]
[ bob at Princeton: 1970-1974]
- 1972 Princeton [I missed his
first 6-10 years of activity since his Rome university degree 1966]
bob meets Remo Ruffini
[wiki] at Princeton: Differential Geometry for GR [thanks
Jim Isenberg!]
and Bob Leach, Mark Johnston (ICRA/ICRANet
logo!), Rick Hanni (see Godel link)
bob meets
Luigi Bianchi [wiki]
translating 90 Italian pages based on college Spanish (Remo's idea),
later published as a Golden Oldie in Gen Relativ Grav nearly
30 years later
[mathematical foundation of spatially homogeneous cosmology;
bob plays here for a couple decades]
bob meets
Kurt Godel [wiki]
bob sort of meets
Demetri Christodoulou [wiki]
- 1974 bob meets
Abe Taub at UC Berkeley (thanks to Remo, diverted from College Park)
Abe was part of the Einstein-Robertson-Wigner-Godel
Princeton Math Community in the 1930s
[bob puts it online: 2000]
- 1974? bob meets Thibault Damour [wiki]
during his California visit with Remo
bob meets
Napoli GR at Remo cosmology school at Erice [first impact with Italy]
- 1978 bob becomes honorary Roman at La Sapienza Fisica
[vanity
photos]
[part time American expat? grounded in 2020 but made it back every other
year since]
- 1979 bob meets Marcel Grossmann
(MG2) [1976: MG1 starts with Abdus Salam in Trieste]
helps organize/edit proceedings MG7-15 1985-2018.
- 1981 bob meets the Vatican Observatory
[Remo
partners with George Coyne;
Bill Stoeger, group(late90s) ]
1985
MG5 & Pope John Paul II
- 1982 MG3 in Shanghai
(Tsvi
Piran enters China with Ruffini travel document created from bob's
passport format)
- late 1980s- early 1990s: golden years of G9 [1985 ICRA
is born]
- 1988 GR at Sapienza history: math guys Carlo Cattaneo [wiki]
[Levi-Civita descendent
wiki, Giorgio
Ferrarese follow
wiki ] and 3
plus 1 leads to
Remo suggesting we think about it:
bob joints up with Donato Bini
and Paolo Carini for
The Many Faces of Gravitoelectromagnetism (Carini, Bini, Jantzen 1992);
mathematical games with black holes etc.
- 1988 MG6 in Perth, bob insists on collecting participant emails,
MacCallum uses them to create
what is now Hyperspace@gu.
-
1990s bob meets Fang Li-Zhi and wife Shuxian Li [lost
ICRA photos;
Leopold;
China 1981?,
Nice 1990; 2010?]
-
2001 the
Fermi project begins, but never ends eventually
bifurcates;
[2012 donato, andrea,
bob and remo discuss the famous
4/3 mass problem of Fermi
(never published),
written when Fermi was a university student and GR was
only a few years old]
-
2000 teens
Donato Bini teams up with Thibault Damour [~ past decade]
-
2015 MG14 bob meets Claudia Graf-Grossmann, grandaughter of
Marcel, author of
his bio
-
2021 bob retires from ICRANet with final push on
pandemic/Sapienza delayed MG15 proceedings
YouTube talk recording (two hour mark 17 May
program)
jantzen website