The Jablonna conference on gravitation: a continuing source of inspiration (Q742186)

The author, Marek Demianski remembers the 1962 Jablonna Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation, later classified as GRG-3 in a long series of cyclic international GRG conferences on this topic. Since Demianski's Master thesis advisor, Leopold Infeld, has been the Chairman of the Local Organizing Committee, Demianski had to help with some tasks of organization. Such he had the good fortune of personal contacts to many of the participants, what makes his report on this conference so lively. Reading it one reminds of the outstanding meaning of this conference. First of all, this meaning goes back to the fact that all leading physicists (under them Nobel prize winners) working at that time on general relativity and gravitation were present in Jablonna and that the scientific topics which were discussed there are a continuing source of inspiration until today. But, even more, this conference had also a great political dimension. Demianski states: ``For the first time since the 2nd World War such a large group of physicists from the West and the East were able to meet. \dots Also Germans from the DDR and the Bundesrepublik were able to meet for the first time since the construction of the Berlin wall.'' That this conference was possible was mainly thanks to Leopold Infeld, whose services to physics and his activities in the international movement of leftist intellectuals \dots the Pugwash Movement of Science and World Affairs -- the author briefly reflects, too. Especially interesting are also Demianski's memories of Feynman's lecture on quantizing general relativity and the discussion after Feynman's talk. Knowing the printed version in ``Acta Physica Polonica'', however, the reviewer would consider different aspects of this discussion exciting as the ones mentioned by Demianski -- maybe, this shows the inspiring role of this conference once more.