The First Capra Meeting
The Capra meetings began in 1998 when Patrick Brady organized a 5-day workshop for a group of Caltech researchers and visitors to discuss "Radiation Reaction in General Relativity". The final 3 days of the workshop were at the Capra Ranch (once owned by the film director Frank Capra, and willed by him to Caltech). The meeting program included discussions of various early papers on radiation reaction as well as the then-recent works of Mino, Sasaki, and Tanaka (1997) and Quinn and Wald (1997) (who both derived what we now know as the MiSaTaQuWa equation).
Photo from the first Capra meeting.
Clockwise around the table, starting at left: Ben Owen, Eric Poisson, Alan Wiseman, Kip Thorne, Teviet Creighton, Jolien Creighton, Kashif Alvi, Patricia Purdue, Warren Anderson, and Eanna Flanagan.
Photo by and courtesy of Patrick Brady.
Photo from the first Capra meeting.
Patricia Purdue and Teviet Creighton.
Photo by and courtesy of Patrick Brady.
First Day at the First Capra Meeting
Capra's first official schedule
Photo by and courtesy of Patrick Brady.
The success of this first meeting helped inspire Adrian Ottewill and others to organize a followup meeting the next year (1999) at University College Dublin; the /Matters of Gravity/ report on that meeting lists 18 attendees.
By 2000, when the meeting returned to Caltech, the modern term "Capra N" was established, and the meetings have been held yearly ever since, most commonly alternating between locations in the USA and elsewhere.
By Jonathan Thornburg
We would also like to thank the contributions of Scott Hughes, Patrick Brady, Eanna Flanagan, Eric Poisson and Bernard Whiting