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Prof. Dr. Dennis Lehmkuhl

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​Dennis Lehmkuhl is Lichtenberg Professor of History and Philosophy of Physics at the University of Bonn. His work focuses on theories of gravity, spacetime structure, and how they interact with matter. He is a passionate proponent of integrated history and philosophy of physics; he has worked on Einstein's interpretation of general relativity and of other spacetime theories, and on the question of how Einstein's positions square with the modern debates in the foundations of spacetime theories. He is particularly interested in the analysis and interpretation of black hole physics and gravitational wave physics.

Prof. Lehmkuhl has been an Editor of Albert Einstein's Collected Papers since 2010, and spent 2015 to 2018 as the only full time Scientific Editor at the Einstein Papers Project. Before that, he was a Departmental Lecturer at the University of Oxford, a Junior Professor at the University of Wuppertal, and a visiting fellow at the Center of Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He graduated with a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2010, after graduate studies at Imperial College London, the London School of Economics and the University of Hamburg. Here is a complete CV.

Email: dennis.lehmkuhl AT uni-bonn.de

Monograph
  • 'Einstein's Principles. On the Interpretation of Gravity'. Under Contract with Oxford University Press; in preparation.

Edited books and special issues
  • `Weshalb auf die Wissenschaft hören? Antworten aus Philosophie und wissenschaftlicher Praxis’. With Andreas Bartels, Springer 2022. 
  • 'The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 16. The Berlin Years: June 1927 - May 1929’ with Diana Kormos Buchwald, Ze’ev Rosenkranz, Daniel J. Kennefick, József Illy, A. J. Kox, Tilman Sauer, Jennifer Nollar James (eds.); Emily de Araujo, Joshua Eisenthal, Jennifer Rodgers, David Rowe (assoc. eds.). Princeton University Press, 2021.
  • 'The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 15. The Berlin Years: June 1925 - April 1927' with Diana Kormos Buchwald, Ze'ev Rosenkranz, József Illy, Anne Kox (eds.); Daniel J. Kennefick, A.J. Kox, Michel Janssen, Tony Duncan (assoc. eds.), forthcoming with Princeton University Press, 2018. Introduction available online at https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.10662.
  • 'Towards a Theory of Spacetime Theories' with Gregor Schiemann and Erhard Scholz. Einstein Studies, Birkäuser/Springer, 2017.
  • Special Issue on 'Particle Physics after the Higgs Discovery' with Simon Friederich, in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Physics, Volume 51, August 2015.
  • 'The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 14. The Berlin Years: April 1923 - June 1925' with Diana Kormos Buchwald, Ze'ev Rosenkranz, Tilman Sauer, József Illy, (eds.); Daniel J. Kennefick, A.J. Kox and Osik Moses (assoc. eds.). Princeton University Press, 2015.
  • 'The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 13. The Berlin Years: January 1922 – March 1923' with Diana Kormos Buchwald, Ze'ev Rosenkranz, Tilman Sauer, József Illy, (eds.); Daniel J. Kennefick, A. J. Kox and Osik Moses (assoc. eds.). Princeton University Press, 2012.
  • 'Hermann Minkowski's 'Space and Time'' (Translation), in: Vesselin Petkov (editor): Minkowski Spacetime: A Hundred Years later. Springer, 2010.
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Peer-Reviewed Articles
Recorded Talks on Youtube            Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture, with Sir Roger Penrose and Melwyn Bragg. 
           Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford.              Festival of Philosophy, Max Planck Society.             Caltech Alumni Association.

Recent Invited and Keynote Talks 
  • 'Einstein’s Forgotten Interpretation: On the unification of gravity and inertia'
         2021: Department of Physics, University of Houston at Texas, USA. 
         2021: Conference “Philosopher’s and Einstein’s Relativity”, University of Napoli, Italy.
  • 'From Schwarzschild’s Singularity and Hadamards’s Catastrophe to Penrose’s trapped surfaces'     2021: Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture, with Sir Roger Penrose and Melwyn Bragg. 
                   Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. 
  • 'Interpreting Spacetime Singularities'  
         2021: Faculty Colloquium of the Black Hole Initiative, Harvard University.
  • 'The History and Interpretation of Penrose’s Singularity Theorem'
         2021: Faculty Colloquium, Department of Physics, University of Bremen, Germany.
  • 'The History and Interpretation of Event Horizons' 
         2019: 9th Annual Conference of the Black Hole Initiative, Harvard University.
  • 'The History and Interpretation of Black Hole Solutions'
         2018: Cambridge Seminar for Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, UK
         2018: Philosophy of Physics Research Seminar, University of Oxford, UK.
  • 'Could it be that spacetime is neither fundamental nor emergent?'
         2017: Workshop 'Spacetime: fundamental or emergent?’ at the University of Bonn, Germany.
  • 'The genesis and interpretation of the problem of motion in General Relativity'
         2017:  6th HPS Tuebingen Summer School.
  • 'The interpretation of vacuum solutions to Einstein’s field equations’
         2017: Workshop on 'Do Black Holes exist? The Physics and Philosophy of Black Holes’. 641th
                    WE-Heraeus-Seminar of the German Physical Society (DPG).
  • 'The discovery of gravitational waves: narrative and facts' 
         2017: Workshop on Political Epistemology at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science.
  • 'What Einstein really thought about General Relativity' 
         2015: CIERA Interdisciplinary Colloqium, Northwestern University.
  • 'The problem of motion in General Relativity'
         2016: Annual Conference of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, Cardiff (UK).          
         2016: 8th Quadrennial Fellows Conference of the Center for Philosophy of Science, Lund,
               Sweden.                                                                                                                                                                     2015: A Century of General Relativity. The ‘Renaissance’ of General Relativity in History: Assessing                    Einstein’s Legacy in Post-World War II Physics.’ The Max Planck Institutes of Gravitational                         Physics and of History of Science, Berlin.                                                                                                           2015: History and Philosophy of Science Seminar, HSS Division, California Institute of Technology           2015: Conference on 'Particles, Fields and Relativity. Conference in Honour of Harvey Brown at                          65.'