University of Texas – Center for Relativity
April 1, 1978
The Center for Relativity began in 1962, under the direction of Alfred Schild. New Chair Harold Hanson conceived the idea of forming, within the Physics Department, centers of excellence. Schild had recently moved from the Department of Mathematics and was quick to embrace the idea and renamed his group The Center for Relativity. The Charter of the Center for Relativity was to discover and describe the behavior of gravitation, a fundamental force that plays its most important roles on very large scales (cosmology) and the very smallest scales (quantum gravity on microscopic fractions of the atomic scales).