History

Historical records answer a different question from modern exposition: not only what a theory says, but what a particular source established at a particular time. Each chronology here follows a finite sequence of primary documents, later scholarship, and modern treatments without turning that sequence into a myth of inevitable progress.

Evidence before interpretation

A primary source can establish what its author stated, calculated, or reported. It does not by itself settle motives, influence, priority, or the later meaning of an early term. Those questions require retrospective scholarly history, comparison with other records, and explicit attention to disagreement. Priority and credit therefore cannot be inferred from publication order alone.

Dates also name different events. A calculation may be presented before its paper is issued; an observation may precede the detailed report; a translation or digital facsimile may appear decades later. The chronologies distinguish the historical act from the edition used for access. They also state what each milestone did not yet establish, which prevents a familiar modern equation from being silently read into an earlier argument.

Five bounded chronologies

From Newtonian Gravity to General Relativity traces seven primary milestones: Newton’s universal inverse-square synthesis; special-relativistic kinematics; Einstein’s bounded equivalence argument; the Einstein–Grossmann metric theory; the two November 1915 advances; and the 1919 eclipse observation reported in 1920. It then uses two scholarly histories to separate discovery heuristics and eclipse interpretation from the primary record.

Development of the Black-Hole Concept traces nine milestones from Schwarzschild’s exact solution through collapse, horizon-regular and maximal extensions, Kerr rotation, trapped surfaces, naming evidence, and the 1971–1972 Cygnus X-1 observations. It keeps exact solutions, global interpretations, terminology, and model-dependent astrophysical inference in their proper evidential roles.

Global Causality and Singularity Theorems follows the move from local geodesic focusing to conformal infinity, causal order, trapped-surface and cosmological incompleteness theorems, and the later cosmic-censorship conjecture. It keeps a theorem’s hypotheses and conclusion attached and never turns geodesic incompleteness into a singular point or curvature blowup.

Gravitational Waves from Theory to Detection connects the 1916–1918 weak-field calculations, radiative asymptotics, resonant-mass and interferometric instruments, binary-pulsar damping, numerical merger waveforms, direct detection, and multimessenger observation. It distinguishes a design, a disputed claim, indirect evidence, and accepted strain observation.

Black-Hole Thermodynamics and Information traces irreducible mass, horizon area, entropy, classical mechanics, Hawking radiation, information-loss and Page-curve arguments, microscopic entropy, firewall reasoning, and island calculations. Every result retains its classical, semiclassical, statistical, supersymmetric, or holographic domain.

How to use the directory

The result is an orientation map, not a substitute for learning the modern theory. The linked Library treatments supply current definitions, derivations, and checks; each historical card explains how a sequence of narrower claims became part of a later framework.