Abstract of Lecture:

The recent announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves is a fitting, and exciting, centennial capstone to the success story of Einstein's theory of general relativity. It was not, however, always this way. The grand developments in relativistic cosmology in recent years obscure the very difficult decades that general relativity and its model of the universe suffered during much of the twentieth century. For those who believe that science marches on, the real story is of fits, starts, doubts, confusion, and rejection of the new. Not an earnest march, but a blue tango. This presentation reviews the peculiar history of the reception, denial, death, and rebirth of one of the greatest conceptions of the human mind. It is a profoundly human story, full of the role of chance, politics, public education, the winds of war, and full of lessons about expectations. There is also a little piece of San Diego history that goes with it.

Brief Biographical Sketch:

Professor Lindner holds a joint appointment in the Departments of History and Astronomy at the University of Michigan. He received his PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976. Although his doctoral thesis was in midieval history, specifically the role of nomads in Asia Minor, Professor Lindner has had a long and abiding interest in the history of Astronomy. He has taught the history of astrophysics and cosmology at Michigan since 1982, and has written a number of articles on the history of astrophysics and a number of short biographies.