About JGRG
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Ever since Einstein had proposed general relativity in 1915,
a lot of effort was put into research on spacetime and gravity.
But for the initial half century it was largely done
from a mathematical or purely theoretical point of view.
The situation changed drastically after the discovery of 3K
cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964 and of a pulsar
in 1967. After these discoveries, the importance of general
relativity in the study of astrophysics was widely recognized,
and research in the areas of cosmology, relativistic astrophysics,
and gravity had bloomed. In Japan the workshops on
`General Relativity and Gravitation' were organized and held
from 1974 for three years, which played the central role in
expanding research in these areas. However, as each sub-field
in astrophysics began to have its own developments, workshops
on more focused areas and specific topics took over the GRG
workshops.
A new turning point came in late 1980's.
The idea to build large-scale interferometers for direct detection
of gravitational waves became more realistic, and research on
gravitation itself started to attract attention again.
In Japan, a program supported by a grant-in-aid for scientific
research on priority areas, ``gravitational wave astronomy", had
started, which later developed into the TAMA project.
Simultaneously with this movement toward research on gravitational
waves, the importance of research in gravitational physics in general
was recognized from new perspectives; from precision observation of
relativistic objects such as black holes and neutron stars, and
from progress in numerical relativity, theoretical cosmology,
and particle astrophysics. This trend motivated several members
of the above-mentioned program to start a renewed series of
workshops on general relativity and gravitation. The first JGRG
workshop (JGRG1) was then held at Tokyo Metropolitan University,
from 4 to 6 December, 1991. There were about 120 participants in
this workshop, indicating that there was indeed a high need for
such a workshop from the community already at that time.
Since then workshops of similar size have been held annually
at different universities in turn. From JGRG10, held at Osaka
University in 2000, we began to invite a few speakers from abroad
and designated English as the language to be used in presentations.
The JGRG workshop series have been supported by active involvement
of young postdocs and graduate students. In turn, it is hoped that
their experience from the JGRG workshop series will help them
grow into world's leading scientists.
The proceedings of the JGRG workshops have been published as printed
volumes. From now on, to enable interested readers to have easier
access, the proceedings will be published as electronic media.
The website for the online proceedings will be managed by
Theoretical Astrophysics Group, Department of Physics,
Kyoto University.
(by Kei-ichi Maeda and Misao Sasaki, April 2009)
Link to Internaitonal Society of GRG(ISGRG)
(JGRG is not directly related to ISGRG)