In 1957, at a conference at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, appealing to various mathematical tools developed by John Lighton Synge, A. Z. Petrov and André Lichnerowicz, Pirani explained more clearly than had previously been possible the central role played by the Riemann tensor and in particular the tidal tensor in general relativity. He gave the first correct description of the relative (tidal) acceleration of initially mutually static test particles that encounter a sinusoidal gravitational plane wave.