The "Renaissance of General Relativity" is dated from the 1955 Bern conference to the early 1970s, when the field entered the physics mainstream

general-relativityhistory-of-physicsphilosophy-of-physicsrenaissance-of-general-relativityhistoriographyhist-pharxiv

Lessel's 2026 paper states the standard periodization it works within: the Renaissance of general relativity began in 1955 with the first international conference on general relativity, held in Bern, Switzerland to mark fifty years since the 1905 special-relativity paper, and closed in the early 1970s once general relativity had secured a settled place within mainstream physics. The paper repeats this dating rather than re-deriving it — a definitional backdrop, not a novel finding of this preprint — but it is load-bearing for the paper's own argument: it is the window against which "Lalli-identified Renaissance center" and "Renaissance PI" are operationalized, and the span the paper's textbooks-as-testimony thesis claims to illuminate.

This periodization and its name originate in earlier historiographical work by Roberto Lalli together with Alexander Blum and Jürgen Renn, who also coined the related phrase "the long relativity revolution" — background the capture's own reading supplies, though the quoted passage above is Lessel's own restatement rather than a citation-adjacent credit, so the claim here is attributed to Lessel's paper as the vault's direct source for the wording.