Remembering Albert Einstein, born 143 years ago today. Over the past century, Einstein's ideas have intermingled with culture and art and shaped our world in infinite, indelible ways.
Albert Einstein once said that there are only two things that might be infinite: the universe and human stupidity. And, he confessed, he wasn't sure about the universe.
Science usually progresses incrementally. Few and far between are contributions that sound the scientific alert that a radical upheaval is at hand. But here one man in one year rang the bell four times, an astonishing outpouring of creative insight. Almost immediately, the scientific establishment could sense that reverberations of Einstein's work were shifting the bedrock understanding of reality. For the wider public, however, Einstein had not yet become Einstein.
On November 6, 1919, four years after Einstein completed the general theory of relativity, newspapers the world over trumpeted just released astronomical measurements establishing that the positions of stars in the heavens were slightly different than what Newton's laws would have us expect, just as Einstein had predicted. The results triumphantly confirmed Einstein's theory and rocketed him to icon status overnight.
Some have gone further, portraying Einstein as the central inspiration for the avant-garde movement of the 20th century, the scientific wellspring that necessitated a cultural rethink. It's romantic to believe that nature's truths set off a tidal wave that swept away the dusty vestiges of an entrenched culture. But I've never seen convincing evidence pinning these upheavals to Einstein's science.
In the decades since, the big bang theory has been substantially developed and, through various refinements, has aced a spectrum of observational tests. One such observation, which received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, revealed that for the past seven billion years not only has space been expanding, but the rate of expansion has been speeding up. The best explanation? The big bang theory augmented by a version of Einstein's long-ago-discarded cosmological constant.
Which is all just to say that the centenary of general relativity is a far cry from a backward glance of historical interest. Einstein's general relativity is tightly woven into the tapestry of today's leading-edge research.
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