General Relativity

My passion for General Relativity started when I was an undergraduate student. Before I tell the story, a disclaimer: I never worked with GR or can be considered a specialist. I did supervise some students who nowadays work on Cosmology and Quantum Gravity, but I never published anything on those subjects except for some translations, lecture notes and other more accessible texts for the general public. Back to the story: when I was an undergraduate back in the 80's I went to the library and found MTW's Gravitation, which of course impressed me but did not make any sense physics-wise since I was a freshman. Moreover, back in the 80's, there were very few students who felt confident enough to learn Physics from a textbook in English, especially when it came to a theme that was no walk in the park. No one ever borrowed MTW's masterpiece (a book so massive that, as the legend goes, it generates its own gravitational field). It was always in the library stacks, waiting to be read. For me the language was not a problem since I had just returned from the US, where I graduated from high school. Around this time, during lectures, I was also introduced to Landau and Lifshitz's series in theoretical physics. Now, in those days the Soviet Union still existed and there was a bookstore in São Paulo (Livraria Stepan Rozov) that specialized in Russian books - mostly technical ones - whose prices were really affordable. All of a sudden I saw myself having access to this plethora of great books for a price that fit into my budget. So in 1986 I bought The Classical Theory of Fields (vol. 2 of L&L's Course of Theoretical Physics) and I will never forget the awe I felt when on § 81 I read : "The theory of gravitational fields, constructed on the basis of the theory of relativity,  is called the general theory of relativity. It was established by Einstein (and finally formulated by him in 1915) and represents probably the most beautiful of all existing physical theories." This sentence stuck with me to this day.

A few years later, during my PhD in Bonn, we had an influx of cosmologists from the former Soviet Union (some of which had worked with Zeldovich or Novikov). They would come for extended periods of time and give talks every now and then. This motivated me to start studying GR more seriously and I haven't stopped ever since. After getting a permanent position, I began to slowly amass a sizable library on the subject - not only technical books but also philosophical and historical ones - and in 2020 came the opportunity to teach the subject for the first time. From these classes, my personal library and a decades-long love for GR my lecture notes were born. I am currently translating parts of Weyl's Space - Time - Matter  from German into Portuguese, in particular the introduction. This is the part where Weyl discusses some key ideias about space, time and reality based on Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology. This is the kind of discussion one rarely finds in modern physics books. But truth be told: Weyl attended Husserl's lectures in Göttingen, so he was - as well as some of his fellow mathematicians and physicists - no stranger to Philosophy!