Building the General Relativity and Gravitation Community During the Cold War by Roberto Lalli

Author:Roberto Lalli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

This was a rather drastic step taken by a member of a formal international scientific organization who was expected to serve as a neutral secretary. Even more so as Mercier’s actions in the community-building activities had always been with the conscious aim of strengthening peaceful cooperation among nations. In this specific case, however, following his personal ethical and political beliefs, Mercier felt that he had the right and the duty to profoundly affect the future of the international community by promoting a political boycott of the meeting.

To make matters worse, Peres had still not received his invitation to the GR5, which made it practically impossible to plan his participation.29 Peres had already explicitly asked not to put the members of the Soviet organizing committee of the GR5 conference in “an embarrassing situation” because they could “not be held responsible” for this state of affairs, and urged Bondi “not to let it escalate into an unpleasant incident.”30 Peres’s wishes could not be complied with. Since the only request made by the ICGRG had not been fulfilled, Bondi could do nothing but send a six-page-long telegram stating that given the inability of the Soviet colleagues to prevent political matters from affecting the organization of the scientific conference, the Soviet conference could not be considered a “truly international conference,” but rather “a Soviet-organized conference to which numerous foreign scientists have been invited.”31 This meant that the Tbilisi conference would not have had the official sponsorship of the ICGRG. Bondi, as President of the committee, would not attend the meeting in order to avoid any ambiguity on this point. However, this decision to withdraw the official sponsorship of the conference, in Bondi’s view, should not have any implications on the participation of the individual scientists who had already planned to attend the Tbilisi conference. For Bondi, no “other political and non-scientific issue is a reason for such cancellation,” explicitly criticizing Mercier’s attempts to boycott the meeting in response to the armed invasion of Czechoslovakia.32

Many people did not follow Bondi’s recommendations and chose not to attend the conference. Most members of the ICGRG boycotted the meeting, deciding that in this particular situation their political views were more important than any attempts to save the ICGRG from potentially destructive tensions.33 The decision of various individuals to cancel their participation in the Tbilisi conference depended on different factors, but the Czech crisis played a particularly relevant role as a letter from Penrose to Bondi made clear: “it seemed to me that any act which appeared to condone the Russian invasion would be unthinkable.”34

There was deep confusion and uncertainty concerning the future of the GRG community. No document can show the feelings of delusion and confusion experienced by the scholars who had long been working on strengthening the GRG field and supporting its institutional representation through the ICGRG better than an unpublished document written by Bergmann in that period. In his attempt to summarize the situation, Bergmann lamented the complete lack of coordination: everything had happened so fast that there had been no way to prepare a coordinated response to the events.

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