• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1935 0

and swell, a rolling marble will follow a different trajectory because it will be guided by the table’s warped and rutted surface. Einstein argued that a similar idea applies to the fabric of space. Completely empty space is much like the flat table, allowing objects to roll unimpeded along straight lines. But the presence of massive bodies affects the shape of space, somewhat as heat affects the shape of the table’s surface. The sun, for example, creates a bulge in its vicinity, much like a metal bubble blistering on the hot table. And just as the table’s curved surface induces the marble to travel along a curved path, so the curved shape of space around the sun guides the earth and other planets into orbit.

This brief description glides over important details. It’s not just space that curves, but time as well (this is what’s called spacetime curvature); earth’s gravity itself facilitates the table’s influence by keeping the marble pressed to its surface (Einstein contended that warps in space and time don’t need a facilitator since they are gravity); space is three-dimensional, so when it warps it does so all around an object, not just “underneath” as the table analogy suggests. Nevertheless, the image of a warped table captures the essence of Einstein’s proposal. Before Einstein, gravity was a mysterious force that one body somehow exerted across space on another. After Einstein, gravity was recognized as a distortion of the environment caused by one object and guiding the motion of others. Right now, according to these ideas, you are anchored to the floor because your body is trying to slide down an indentation in space (really, spacetime) caused by the earth.*

Einstein spent years developing this idea into a rigorous mathematical framework, and the resulting Einstein Field Equations, the heart of his general theory of relativity, tell us precisely how space and time will curve as a result of the presence of a given quantity of matter (more precisely, matter and energy; according to Einstein’s E = mc2, in which E is energy and m is mass, the two are interchangeable).3 With equal precision, the theory then shows how such spacetime curvature will affect the motion of anything—star, planet, comet, light itself—moving through it; this allows physicists to make detailed predictions of cosmic motion.

Evidence in support of general relativity came quickly. Astronomers had long known that Mercury’s orbital motion around the sun deviated slightly from what Newton’s mathematics predicted. In 1915, Einstein used his new equations to recalculate Mercury’s trajectory and was able to explain the discrepancy, a realization he later described to his colleague Adrian Fokker as so thrilling that for some hours it gave him heart palpitations. Then, in 1919, astronomical observations undertaken by Arthur Eddington and his collaborators showed that distant starlight passing by the sun on its way to earth follows a curved path, just the one that general relativity predicted.4 With that confirmation—and the New York Times headline proclaiming LIGHTS ALL ASKEW IN THE HEAVENS, MEN OF SCIENCE MORE OR LESS AGOG—Einstein was propelled to international prominence as the world’s newfound scientific genius, the heir apparent to Isaac Newton.

But the most impressive tests of general relativity were still to come. In the 1970s experiments using hydrogen maser clocks (masers are similar to lasers, but they operate in the microwave part of the spectrum) confirmed general relativity’s prediction of the earth’s warping of spacetime in its vicinity to about 1 part in 15,000. In 2003, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft was used for detailed studies of the trajectories of radio waves that passed near the sun; the data collected supported the curved spacetime picture predicted by general relativity to about 1 part in 50,000. And now, befitting a theory that has truly come of age, many of us walk around with general relativity in the palm of our hand. The global positioning system you casually access from your smartphone communicates with satellites whose internal