Marcel Grossmann Award

Origin

On a quiet evening in the Stanford Library, a man approached Remo Ruffini. He was Mr. Chang, a figure familiar to generations at Stanford, who had entered the Physics Department as a Chinese graduate student in 1937 and had remained ever since as one of its enduring presences. Already in his seventies, Mr. Chang had a deep knowledge of the history of physics. He asked Ruffini, "Professor, why do you never mention Marcel Grossmann in your lectures?"

He then showed Ruffini a two-part paper published by Albert Einstein and Marcel Grossmann in 1913. The first part, written by Einstein, was the physical part: an early attempt to geometrize physical interactions. The second part, written by Grossmann, was the mathematical part: it showed that Einstein's ideas could be expressed through the absolute differential calculus developed by the Italian geometers Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro and Tullio Levi-Civita. Together, the two parts helped lay the foundations of general relativity and revealed the decisive interplay among mathematics, geometry, and physics.

After returning to Italy, Remo Ruffini was given an important opportunity: frequent and fruitful meetings with Abdus Salam. Ruffini wanted to bring relativistic astrophysics to a wider scientific community, so that the fundamental laws of nature could be understood more deeply. Salam embraced this goal with enthusiasm. They also shared another conviction: fundamental thinking should be extended to a broader international community. Their motto was, "In understanding the laws of nature, no nation can afford the luxury of having another nation think on its behalf." The size or degree of specialization of a country's contribution was not the essential point. What mattered was that every nation exercise its right to discovery and original thought, a right that profoundly elevates human existence.

They decided to act on two levels. Knowing Ruffini's love of mountains and adventurous travel, Salam asked him to help create a special summer school in Pakistan. Salam chose Nathiagali, a beautiful village in the Hindu Kush mountains that had once served as the summer capital of the North-West Frontier Province under British rule. The mountain insignia of the British army and the ancient forests, where leopards and pumas could still be found, evoked the dreamlike landscapes of Kipling. They paid particular attention to PhD graduates from developing countries who, after working at the frontier of science in the world's leading universities, returned to institutions in their home countries where even electricity could be unreliable and where they faced complete scientific and intellectual isolation. With support from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, they founded a school called Physics and Contemporary Needs, bringing together scientists and university professors from countries ranging from Indonesia to Morocco. They invited lecturers who had made recent discoveries in science and who also had a gift for communication.

Their second step moved in a very different direction: to nurture the most promising processes of discovery arising at the intersection of mathematics and physics, especially in relativistic astrophysics. This effort required not only theoretical and geometrical work, but also new technologies capable of precision measurements from the ground and from space, as well as new observations on subnuclear and astrophysical scales. In discussions with Werner Heisenberg, Ruffini saw the work of Einstein and Grossmann as a remarkable example of the resonant interaction among mathematics, geometry, and physics, an interaction that opened the path to general relativity. To celebrate that interaction and to invoke it as a sign of future success, Ruffini and Salam decided to launch the Marcel Grossmann Meetings, or MG Meetings. Their scope would run from general relativity to relativistic field theories, from pure mathematics to astrophysical observations, from numerical and algebraic techniques to new theoretical tools, all united by a single purpose: to advance the determination of the fundamental laws of physics.