Jean-Philippe Martinez, The Fock-Infeld dispute: an illustration of the renaissance of general relativity in the Soviet Union, in A. Blum et al., eds, The Renaissance of General Relativity in Context, 113–139, Birkhäuser/Springer, Cham, 2020
Mathematical Reviews, MR4305121

The author examines the socio-political history of Vladimir Fock’s eccentric interpretation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, focusing on an exchange with Einstein’s former collaborator Leopold Infeld in the early 1950s concerning their rival approaches to the problem of motion. In line with earlier appreciations by Loren Graham (1987) and Gennady Gorelik (1993), Martinez attributes Fock’s success in defending general relativity from philosophically-inclined attacks from Soviet Marxists to his creative alignment of Einstein’s theory with dialectical materialism. Upon the death of Stalin, the Soviet Marxist philosophers lost their political sway, leaving Fock – and a few elements of his personal reading of general relativity – in a more prominent position among relativists in the Soviet Union.