General Relativity, Geometry, and Unification
Frank Steiner (Ulm), “Do we live in a 'small Universe' ?”
Jim Ritter (Paris), “Mathematicians, Einstein, and the Unification Project: A Tale of Two Cities”
Hubert Goenner (Göttingen), “Unified Field Theory up to the 1960s: its development and the interaction among research groups”
Formative Ideas for Spacetime Structures
Scott Walter (Nancy), “How did Minkowski discover spacetime?”
Engelbert Schücking (New York), “What is General Relativity?”
Harvey Brown (Oxford), “Why do rods contract? Extending John Bell's "Lorentzian pedagogy" into general relativity.”
Relativity in Göttingen and Beyond
Tilman Sauer (Caltech), “General relativity from Hilbert's perspective”
Katherine Brading (Notre Dame), “Hilbert and Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity: Two Communications on the Foundations of Physics”
Jean Eisenstaedt (Paris), "From the Schwarzschild singularity to the black-hole horizon"
Testing General Relativity and Rival Theories
Clifford Will (St. Louis), “Putting General Relativity to the Test: 20th Century Highlights and 21st Century Prospects”
Herbert Pfister (Tübingen), “Rotating hollow and full spheres: Einstein, Thirring, Lense, and beyond”
Allan Franklin (Boulder, Colorado), “The Rise and Fall of the Fifth Force”
Cycles, Waves, and Inflation
Helge Kragh (Aarhus), “Continual Fascination: Oscillatory Cosmological Models after Einstein”
Dan Kennefick (Fayetteville, Arkansas), “Relativistic Lighthouses: The role of binary pulsars in proving the existence of gravitational waves”
Christopher Smeenk (London, Ontario), “Inflation as a Theory of Structure Formation”
Conformal Boundaries and Quantum Geometry
Abhay Ashtekar (Penn State), “Classical Singularities and Quantum Spacetime”
Jörg Frauendiener (New Zealand), “Development and applications of conformal infinity”
Roger Penrose (Oxford), “Conformal boundaries, Quantum Geometry, and Cyclic Cosmology”
Mainstream and Exotic Cosmology
Norbert Straumann (Zürich), “Problems with modified theories of gravity, as alternatives to dark energy”
Hans Jörg Fahr (Bonn), “Cosmologies with cosmic vacuum energy decay and the creation of effective cosmic matter”
Erhard Scholz (Wuppertal), “Can scale covariant Weylian geometry be relevant in contemporary cosmology?”
Mathematical Motifs in General Relativity
Sergiu Klainerman (Princeton): "On Cosmic Censorship and the Cauchy Problem"
Donal O’Shea (Mt. Holyoke, Mass.), “The Unexpected Resolution of the Poincaré Conjecture”
Domenico Giulini (MPI für Gravitationsphysik, Golm), “On the Nature of Geometrodynamics”
Quantum Gravity and String Theory
Robert Wald (Chicago): "On Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetimes"
Matthias Gaberdiel (Zurich): "String Theory and Spacetime Geometry"
Jürg Fröhlich (Zurich): "Events in Quantum Theory and the Emergence of Space-Time"