In addition to doing the archival work, oral history interviews and creating the database that cross-correlates the documents of the main thinkers of the Renaissance of GR, we published a series of papers outlining our first results.
Our first major achievement analyses and contextualises one of Roger Penrose’s first major results on GR. Recorded in our paper “On Penrose’s Analogy between Curved Spacetime Regions and Optical Lenses,” it combines research in mathematical physics, history of physics, and philosophy of physics in a novel way, uncovering the genesis of the analogy between curved spacetime regions and optical lenses, the mathematical details of how the analogy works, and how the analogy was interpreted and used by Sir Roger.
Speaking of achievements, one of the most important achievements of Penrose himself is the first singularity theorem of 1965 that eventually got him the Nobel Prize. One of the objectives of the COGY project is to uncover the genesis, context, and early interpretation of Penrose’s first singularity theorem, and the project has made major progress on this front. In the forthcoming paper “The Prediction and Interpretation of Singularities and Black Holes: From Einstein and Schwarzschild to Penrose and Wheeler”, the interpretation of the mathematical concept of a spacetime singularity is traced, how it changed from Einstein to Penrose, and its role in the proof of the first singularity theorem is clarified. The paper distinguishes between 8 possible interpretations of the concept, and identifies the interpretation that Penrose himself favoured in his 1965 paper and thereafter.
Two further papers are available as preprints, one of them uncovering the mathematical details of Penrose diagrams as applied to black holes, the other uncovering the more algebraic early work of Pascual Jordan on the basis of which much of the Renaissance work on exact solutions to the Einstein field equations was based.
