The idea emerged in conversation with Jürgen Renn of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin that it would be natural for his group to build upon its experience in both the history of general relativity and the history of quantum mechanics by focusing on the history of quantum gravity. This would be an unusual endeavor in the sense that such a theory still does not exist – in spite of almost a century of effort. Our thought was that a thorough investigation of this history could uncover and connect some lost insights. We also intended that we would incorporate some of what we learned into a new final chapter of an English expansion of Jürgen’s Auf den Schultern von Riesen und Zwergen (On the Shoulders of Giants and Dwarfs).

This did become a research topic of Jürgen’s Department 1 at the Institute, with an initial report from 2012 displayed in this poster. We have organized two workshops on this subject. The first was held under the auspices of the Einstein Project at the California Institute of Technology in the summer of 2010, and the second with an even larger interdisciplinary international group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin in the summer of 2011. We will soon publish a source book that gathers relevant primary literature up through 1950, with accompanying commentary.

I am currently working on an analysis of constrained Hamiltonian dynamics in the period beginning around 1950, with particular attention to its usage in efforts to create a quantum theory of gravity. This will be the subject of the lecture I will give at the Einstein centenary celebration In December, 2015, in Berlin.