The Portuguese Academic Community and the Theory of Relativity

One of the areas of greatest interest to researchers in the field of the history of science is the study of the process of appropriation of new scientific theories in countries that can be classified as peripheral in terms of their scientific output. Peripheral countries are those whose academic community is distanced from advanced centers in terms of the research they produce and that have participated to a lesser extent in the process of scientific creation. Like many other countries, the Portuguese academic community finds itself in this situation. Recent studies on the history of relativity have extended to comparative studies on its early reception in various countries (GLICK, 1987 and EINSENTAEDT, 1992). In this article, we do not present a comparative study, but report the principle facts regarding the way in which the Portuguese academic community began learning about the arguments presented by the new theory of relativity, which gave rise to a new paradigm in contemporary physics. And what better occasion is there to do this than in the centennial year of 2005?