Born OTD in 1879, Albert Einstein inspired a new vision of the entire fabric of the cosmos with his general theory of relativity.
Einstein became a legend, his name forevermore synonymous with genius.The curvature of spacetime lies at the heart of general relativity. The theory predicts that anything moving through a gravitational field undisturbed by other forces will follow a curved path called a geodesic. Geodesics on two-dimensional curved surfaces, like the Earth’s, illustrate how curvature creates gravity.
Astronomers have already detected another offspring of general relativity, black holes, throughout the cosmos. But Einstein didn’t believe they would exist, either.In the middle of the 19th century, astronomers discovered that the orbit of Mercury doesn’t quite conform to the path predicted by Newtonian gravity. On each trip around the sun, Mercury’s closest approach, or perihelion, shifts forward by a slight amount, less than 2 degrees of arc per century .
At first progress was slow. Then a key clue emerged in 1908, when the mathematician Hermann Minkowski showed how special relativity required the merger of space with time . In special relativity, measures of space or time differ for different observers. But Minkowski showed that space and time combined — spacetime — yielded a mathematical description of events that all observers could agree on. Any event’s location could be specified by a set of space and time coordinates.
During his years at the patent office, Einstein produced an explosive output of papers poking holes in traditional physics, including reports on his special theory of relativity and Nobel Prize–winning work on quantum physics. Eventually those papers led to sufficient recognition in the physics world to get a faculty appointment in Prague. But at the first chance he returned to Zurich, where Grossmann now taught math. There Einstein and Grossmann developed thetheory.
Today, Einstein’s cosmological constant has been revived. Rather than preventing the universe from collapse, the vacuum energy it describes can explain why the universe now expands at an accelerating pace. General relativity, cosmological constant and all, today forms the core science for analyzing the history of the universe and forecasting its future.
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