Pembroke Fellow James Read Awarded Mid-Career Fellowship by The British Academy

Pembroke Professor and Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy James Read has been awarded a Mid-Career Fellowship by The British Academy. These awards aim to support outstanding individual researchers with excellent research proposals, as well as to promote public understanding and engagement with humanities and social sciences. 

Professor Read’s project, titled ‘The inevitability of general relativity: derivations, principles, and consilience’, will take a closer look at new derivations of Einstein’s field equations since his theory of general relativity was written. He describes the project below.

‘Einstein's general theory of relativity, completed in 1915, remains our best theory of space, time, and gravitation. Central to general relativity are Einstein's field equations, which describe how, in the immortal words of John Wheeler, "spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve".

In his development of general relativity, Einstein arrived at the field equations through a combination of the need to recover the known equations of Newtonian gravity in the right contexts, and various principles such as 'general covariance' and 'Mach's principle'. In the intervening century, however, dozens of new derivations of Einstein's field equations from diverse areas of physics have been proposed.

But what is the structure of these derivations? How do they compare to each other? And to what extent does this apparently great consilience speak to the inevitability of Einstein's edifice?’ 

Supported by The British Academy, Professor Read’s research will seek to answer these questions. 

Many congratulations to Professor Read on receiving this award.