Confronting Gravity was a pair of invitation-only workshops on St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands (13–18 March 2006 and 24–29 March 2012).
Physicist Lawrence Krauss designed both six-day meetings and financier Jeffrey Epstein paid every bill.
About twenty researchers — including Stephen Hawking, Gerard't Hooft, David Gross, Frank Wilczek, Lisa Randall, Kip Thorne, Alan Guth, Jim Peebles and others — spent mornings in seminar rooms and afternoons on boats or a submarine, debating quantum gravity, dark-energy puzzles, and the small but non-zero cosmological constant.
Participants praised the informal exchanges, yet the gatherings later drew scrutiny once Epstein's criminal history became public.
2006 Conference
2012 Conference
Timeline and Setting
Krauss opened the first session at the Ritz-Carlton, St. Thomas, branding it "Confronting Gravity: A workshop to explore fundamental questions in physics and cosmology."1
Days mixed short talks with excursions, including a visit to Epstein's private Little St. James island.2 Six years later Krauss reconvened most of the same scientists, again on St. Thomas, following the identical small-group formula.3
Funding and Logistics
Epstein's J. Epstein VI Foundation covered travel, suites, meals and leisure outings; Krauss handled academic content.14 Epstein told local press his aim was simply "fun and physics."1
Discussion Themes
Sessions asked how to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics, why vacuum energy is tiny but non-zero, and which experimental probes — especially gravitational waves — might test candidate theories.2
By 2012 the group revisited those questions with fresh focus on space-time fluctuations and wave detection prospects.3
Outcomes
No proceedings exist — Edge.org essays and press interviews by Krauss summarize the main points.2
Several attendees later cited the retreats when describing goals for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and related projects.
When Epstein was arrested in 2019, photos of Hawking on Little St. James resurfaced, and outlets such as New York Magazine used Confronting Gravity to illustrate Epstein's reach into elite science.5 Bloggers noted the submarine excursion as emblematic of the meetings' unusual sponsorship.