Freeman Dyson and Gravitational Spin Precession

Abstract

In 1974 Hulse and Taylor discovered the binary pulsar. At that time Prof. Dyson was visiting the Max Planck Institute for Physics at Munich, where I was also working. He initiated a number of discussions on this object. During them it occurred to me that this system could be used to test Geodetic Precession in Einsteins theory, which, even after years of work by the Stanford gyroscope expt, had remained a challenge. I showed some preliminary calculations to Prof Dyson and he encouraged me to do a more refined job. To be applicable to the binary pulsar, one needed to generalise the general relativistic calculations to beyond the so called test particle assumption. Barker and OConnell had obtained such a result from analysing the gravitational interactions of spin half Dirac fermions in linearized spin 2 theories of gravitation. With C.F. Cho I produced a purely classical calculation, using Schwingers Source theory. Boerner, Ehlers and Rudolf confirmed this result with their general relativistic calculations shortly after. With V. Radhakrishnan, I gave a detailed model for the pulse width and polarization sweep as a means of observing this effect. All throughout Prof. Dyson was supportive with reading the manuscripts and his critical comments. In 2005, coincidentally the centennial of the Annus Mirabilis(1905), Hotan, Bailes and Ord observed this in the binary pulsar J1141 6545.