![]() Image: GEEK3/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 3.0), ADAPTED BY E. And from the Times of London on November 7: “Revolution in Science, New Theory of the Universe, Newtonian Ideas Overthrown.”Įinstein became a legend, his name forevermore synonymous with genius. “Lights all askew in the heavens, men of science more or less agog,” proclaimed one of the most famous newspaper headlines in science history, in the Nov. Even without Twitter to spread the word, Einstein’s triumph sparked a media sensation. Such measurements, made during eclipse expeditions in 1919, confirmed Einstein’s calculation. During a solar eclipse, such a shift could be photographed and measured. That deflection would shift the apparent position of the source of the light (say, a distant star). If gravity curves space, he had realized early on, a light beam passing near a massive object (say, the sun) would be deflected from its course. By the last paper he had finally found the decisive equation that launched his gravitation revolution.įour years later, general relativity made Einstein himself a celebrity. His theory began to solidify, and he swiftly composed four papers, one a week, during November 1915. By 1914 he had essentially given up, believing that a partially successful attempt - a sort of general relativity lite - was the best that nature would allow.īut then somehow Einstein’s brain rebooted. And he found that nature stubbornly refused to cooperate. He struggled with distractions, both in his personal life and in physics problems posed by quantum theory. Einstein had to learn new math and jettison common prejudices, such as the universal belief that Euclidean geometry described reality accurately. From 1907 to 1914 he struggled with what the physicist Abraham Pais called “one of the hardest problems of the century” - explaining gravity in a way that permits the laws of nature to be the same for all observers, no matter how they are moving. On his road to general relativity, Einstein himself took many wrong turns. Satellite signals designed to keep your car on the right road would be off by miles if not corrected for the effects predicted by Einstein’s math. Without general relativity, for instance, GPS devices would be worthless. And its implications are not limited to esoteric concerns on cosmic scales - it has its down-to-Earth impacts as well. It’s at the heart of identifying and investigating crucial questions about space and time, existence and reality. General relativity explains how the universe can obey physical laws that apply to any form of motion. “The implications for the further reaches of the universe were more surprising than even Einstein ever realized,” physicist Stephen Hawking has written. From general relativity flowed the realization that the universe is expanding, that it contains spacetime bottomless pits called black holes, that it is traversed by ripples in space triggered by cataclysmic collisions. General relativity inspired a new vision of the entire fabric of the cosmos. ![]() It’s about explaining the totality of existence. #Power calculator physics how toAs expressed decades later by the physicist John Archibald Wheeler, mass grips spacetime, telling it how to curve, and spacetime grips mass, telling it how to move.īut general relativity is about more than just understanding gravity. Gravity, said Einstein, actually moved matter along the curving pathways embodied in spacetime - paths imprinted by mass and energy themselves. After years of struggle, Einstein succeeded in showing that matter and spacetime mutually interact to mimic Newton’s naïve idea that masses attract each other. A decade earlier, his special theory of relativity had merged matter with energy while implying the unity of space and time (soon to be christened as spacetime). #Power calculator physics seriesGravity’s secrets succumbed to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, unveiled in a series of papers submitted a century ago this November to the Prussian Academy in Berlin. ![]() Gravity, Einstein showed, did not just make what goes up always come down. It took an Einstein to figure out gravity’s true modus operandi. But he couldn’t explain how, and he famously refused to try. Newton’s law of gravity had united the earthly physics of falling apples with the cosmic dances of planets and stars. But Einstein looked at space and time and saw a single dynamic stage - spacetime - on which matter and energy strutted, generating sound and fury, signifying gravity. And time, Newton declared, flowed at its own pace, oblivious to the clocks that measured it. ![]() Albert Einstein opened humankind’s eyes to the universe.īefore Einstein, space seemed featureless and changeless, as Isaac Newton had defined it two centuries earlier. ![]()
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