Peter Bergmann

Peter Gabriel Bergmann (March 24, 1915 – October 19, 2002 It was Philipp Frank who recommended Bergmann as a research assistant for Einstein. During this period, he helped Einstein in the quest for a unified field theory encompassing Einstein's theory of gravity (general relativity) and Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism. They pursued the Kaluza–Klein theory and published two joint papers. In the second one, they were joined by Valentin Bargmann. At this time, Einstein and his collaborators investigated numerous possible approaches to a unified field theory. By the 1940s, however, Einstein had lost interest in the (five-dimensional) Kaluza–Klein theory. For instance, its predicted mass for the electron was off by a factor of 1018.

After his time at Princeton, Bergmann taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the academic year 1941–42 and Lehigh University in Pennsylvania from 1942 to 1944.

Bergmann work at Syracuse University in New York State from 1947 to 1982, becoming a full professor in 1953.

In 1947, no department of physics in the United States had a center for research in general relativity. For the rest of his career, he was interested in a variety of different topics on theoretical physics, including general covariance, canonical quantum gravity, and relativistic statistical mechanics.

Bergmann and his students were the primary contributors to the literature of general relativity until the mid-1950s. Bergmann facilitated this trend not just with his research but also his teaching and administrative skills. He was one of the principal organizers of the inaugural Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics in Dallas, 1963.

When Edward P. Tryon came out in 1973 with a paper in Nature titled "Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?”, Tryon mentions how he learned from Bergmann how our universe could have started with zero energy and not contradict the conservation of energy law because mass-energy is positive and gravitational energy is negative and they cancel each other out and so our universe than could begin with zero energy.

After retiring from Syracuse in 1982, he was appointed a visiting professor at New York University (NYU), a position he kept until his death. (via Ernst G. Straus to Paul Erdős).

Publications In 1942, Bergmann published the first textbook on general relativity, Introduction to the Theory of Relativity, with a foreword by Einstein, who predicted—correctly—that the teaching of relativity would expand in the future. It was an important textbook on the subject, studied extensively during the mid-twentieth century, and on motion in curved spacetime. In 2002, shortly before his death, Bergmann learned that he and John Archibald Wheeler had won the inaugural Einstein Prize from the American Physical Society (APS) for "pioneering investigations in general relativity, including gravitational radiation, black holes, spacetime singularities, and symmetries in Einstein’s equations, and for leadership and inspiration to generations of researchers in general relativity."

Death He died in Seattle, Washington, after a long illness.