“Behind the Scenes of the 1957 Chapel Hill Conference on the Role of Gravitation in Physics”, 2021-12 (; backlinks):
This brief paper will peel back some layers of the Chapel Hill conference, to look at its somewhat surprising origins in private philanthropy, motivated by the promise of new technologies based on anti-gravity or gravity control.
We are fortunate to have a very full historical record of the conference and the so-called Institute of Field Physics that hosted it—the account I present here is a highly abridged version of the more detailed accounts given in 2018 and Rickles (forthcoming).