Dr. Jean-Philippe Martinez
Location Potsdam
Main Focus
I am a historian and philosopher of physics working on the history of the two-body problem in general relativity. In this context, my interests cover a wide range of topics, from purely epistemic questions to the socio-cultural aspects of scientific development. In particular, I work on the development of approximate analytical solutions, the interface with numerical relativity and the role that analytical and numerical relativity methods played in the discovery of gravitational waves by the LIGO scientific collaboration and the Virgo collaboration in 2015. I am also interested in the transfer of knowledge and methodologies between the fields of high-energy physics and general relativity.
Publications
Here is a link to my publications from the HAL database.
Curriculum Vitae
Originally from France, I completed my BSC in physics at the University of Pau and the Adour Region, before developing a growing interest in the history and philosophy of science. In 2017, I obtained my PhD in the latter field at the University Paris Diderot (now Paris Cité), under the supervision of Profs. Jan Lacki and Alexei Kojevnikov. My doctoral research was devoted to exploring Soviet physicist Vladimir Fock’s interpretations of quantum mechanics and general relativity. I began my first postdoctoral position at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, where I studied the impact of anti-reductionism on the work of various Marxist physicists. I then moved to Germany in 2020 for a postdoc in the research unit "The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider," first at RWTH Aachen University, and later at the Technical University of Berlin. My project focused on the formation and development of the concept of virtual particles. In April 2024, I joined the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics as a Balzan fellow.