The Hidden Reality_ Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos - Brian Greene [7]
Six years later, in a seminar room at Mount Wilson Observatory in California, Einstein focused intently as Lemaître laid out a more detailed version of his theory that the universe began in a primordial flash and that the galaxies were burning embers floating on a swelling sea of space. When the seminar concluded, Einstein stood up and declared Lemaître’s theory to be “the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.”1 The world’s most famous physicist had been persuaded to change his mind about one of the world’s most challenging mysteries. While still largely unknown to the general public, Lemaître would come to be known among scientists as the father of the big bang.
General Relativity
The cosmological theories developed by Friedmann and Lemaître relied on a manuscript Einstein sent off to the German Annalen der Physik on the twenty-fifth of November 1915. The paper was the culmination of a nearly ten-year mathematical odyssey, and the results it presented—the general theory of relativity—would prove to be the most complete and far-reaching of Einstein’s scientific achievements. With general relativity, Einstein invoked an elegant geometrical language to thoroughly refashion the understanding of gravity. If you already have a good grounding in the theory’s basic features and cosmological implications, feel free to skip three sections ahead. But if you’d like a brief reminder of the highlights, stay with me.
Einstein began work on general relativity around 1907, a time when most scientists thought gravity had long since been explained by the work of Isaac Newton. As high school students around the world are routinely taught, in the late 1600s Newton came up with his so-called Universal Law of Gravity, providing the first mathematical description of this most familiar of nature’s forces. His law is so accurate that NASA engineers still use it to calculate spacecraft trajectories, and astronomers still use it to predict the motion of comets, stars, even entire galaxies.2
Such demonstrable efficacy makes it all the more remarkable that, in the early years of the twentieth century, Einstein realized that Newton’s Law of Gravity was deeply flawed. A seemingly simpleminded question revealed this starkly: How, Einstein asked, does gravity work? How, for example, does the sun reach out across 93 million miles of essentially empty space and affect the motion of the earth? There’s no rope tethering them together, no chain tugging the earth as it moves, so how does gravity exert its influence?
In his Principia, published in 1687, Newton recognized the importance of this question but acknowledged that his own law was disturbingly silent about the answer. Newton was certain that there had to be something communicating gravity from place to place, but he was unable to identify what that something might be. In the Principia he gibingly left the question “to the consideration of the reader,” and for more than two hundred years, those who read this challenge simply read on. That’s something Einstein couldn’t do.
For the better part of a decade, Einstein was consumed with finding the mechanism underlying gravity; in 1915, he proposed an answer. Although grounded in sophisticated mathematics and requiring conceptual leaps unheralded in the history of physics, Einstein’s proposal had the same air of simplicity as the question it purported to address. By what process does gravity exert its influence across empty space? The emptiness of empty space seemingly left everyone empty-handed. But, actually, there is something in empty space: space. This led Einstein to suggest that space itself might be gravity’s medium.
Here’s the idea. Imagine rolling a marble across a large metal table. Because the table’s surface is flat, the marble will roll in a straight line. But if a fire subsequently engulfs the table, causing it to buckle