2019/10/09 by Donald Salisbury, Salisbury, Donald, Kennefick, Daniel
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #History and Philosophy of Physics (physics.hist-ph) #Relativity and Gravitational Theory
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1910.03753
openalex publication_date 2019/10/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In a series of papers published in the course of his dissertation work in the mid 1950's, Andrzej Trautman drew upon the slow motion approximation developed by his advisor Infeld, the general covariance based strong conservation laws enunciated by Bergmann and Goldberg, the Riemann tensor attributes explored by Goldberg and related geodesic deviation exploited by Pirani, the permissible metric discontinuities identified by Lichnerowicz, O'Brien and Synge, and finally Petrov's classification of vacuum spacetimes. With several significant additions he produced a comprehensive overview of the state of research in equations of motion and gravitational waves that was presented in a widely cited series of lectures at King's College, London, in 1958. Fundamental new contributions were the formulation of boundary conditions representing outgoing gravitational radiation the deduction of its Petrov type, a covariant expression for null wave fronts, and a derivation of the correct mass loss formula due to radiation emission. Ivor Robinson had already in 1956 developed a bi-vector based technique that had resulted in his rediscovery of exact plane gravitational wave solutions of Einstein's equations. He was the first to characterize shear-free null geodesic congruences. He and Trautman met in London in 1958, and there resulted a long-term collaboration whose initial fruits were the Robinson-Trautman metric, examples of which were exact spherical gravitational waves.