In the history of science, few figures have had the impact, influence, and enduring legacy of Albert Einstein.
Host | Matthew S Williams
On ITSPmagazine 👉 https://itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/matthew-s-williams
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Episode Description
In the history of science, few figures have had the impact, influence, and enduring legacy of Albert Einstein.
From Relativity and Black Holes to the Cosmological Constant and Quantum theory, Einstein forever changed our understanding of the Universe and the laws that govern it.
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Resources
What is Einstein’s Theory of Relativity?: https://www.universetoday.com/45484/einsteins-theory-of-relativity-1/
Astronomy Cast Ep. 536: Everyday Relativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuiBmctHNsk
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For more podcast Stories from Space with Matthew S Williams, visit: https://itspmagazine.com/stories-from-space-podcast
Einstein’s Revolution
The authors acknowledge that this podcast was recorded on the traditional unseeded lands of the Lekwungen peoples.
Hello, and welcome back to Stories from Space. I'm your host, Matt Williams. And today, I'm going to be picking up in an ongoing segment about the history of science and the people who revolutionized our understanding of the Universe.
In previous episodes, we covered Copernicus and his revolution with the Copernican model. We covered Galileo and Newton. And today we're going to be talking about Albert Einstein, who is considered by many to be the most influential scientists that ever lived.
Though some consider it to be a toss up between Einstein and Newton. Clearly, it all depends on who you ask. But of course, there's a reason why Einstein and Newton would be considered neck and neck.
Both of these men revolutionized our thinking and understanding of the Universe and the laws of physics by synthesizing so much in a way of theory and information and experimental data that had been produced up until that point, and offered common sense explanations that brought it all into a singular system that would remain official canon for - in Newton's case - centuries, and Einstein's case, it's only been a century and yet his theories continue to hold up in spite of intense scrutiny and experimental tests.
Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which he developed between 1905 and 1915/16. It challenged our notions of space, time, energy and matter. It became a foundational component to our understanding of modern physics and cosmology.
But his scientific contributions went far beyond this. He touched on almost every field of science in his day. He opened the door to the realm of quantum physics, which was not yet even out of the crib by the early 20th century, when Albert Einstein began to make his impact. He became a household name because of the sheer depth of his influence.
And whereas the previous two centuries had been characterized by Universal Gravitation, fixed frames of reference, and time and space as absolute concepts, Einstein helped usher in an age of Uncertainty Principles, black holes, quantum entanglements, and the idea that time and space as well as matter and energy were just different expressions of the same thing.
But as usual, before we get into his groundbreaking theories, a little bit about his life and his upbringing and the path that led him to becoming one of if not the most influential scientists that ever lived and a household name.
So Einstein was born on March 14th 1879, in the city of Ulm, which was a part of the Kingdom of Württemberg at the time, but it's now part of the German state of Baden-Württemberg. His parents were both secular Ashkenazi Jews and his father was a salesman, an engineer, and his family moved around several times when he was young due to changing financial situations.
However, Einstein would spend the majority of his formative years in Munich where he got his primary and secondary education. And by 1894, he wrote his first scientific publication called “On the investigation of the state of the aether in a magnetic field.”
Eventually, he moved to Zurich in Switzerland, where he attended Zurich Polytechnic. By this time, he had already demonstrated an aptitude for physics and mathematics. He also demonstrated an aptitude for self directed learning rather than the rote transmission model that was so predominant at the time.
After graduating, he would remain in Zurich and obtain Swiss citizenship. And he married his first wife and 1904 and had two sons before they divorced in 1919. And when I graduated from Zurich Polytechnic, he was awarded a teaching diploma and spent the next two years looking for a teaching post. However, unable to find one he eventually secured a job at the Federal Office for intellectual property in Bern, Switzerland.
And it was while working at this patent office that he began to reflect on some of the greatest questions and unresolved mysteries having to do with modern day physics and studies of electromagnetism.
In particular, he was concerned about research that dealt with the transmission of electric signals and the electrical and mechanical synchronization of time. In 1905, Einstein completed his thesis at the University of Zurich, his mentor being Professor Alfred Kleiner, the University's professor of experimental physics.
His thesis was titled “A new determination of molecular dimensions.” And it was also in that same year that Einstein had his “annus mirabilis” or miracle year, where he published multiple papers, including his most seminal paper to date on Special Relativity.
And this theory was summarized by the famous equation E equals MC squared, which according to surveys is the most well known and oft-quoted equation ever. Even more so than Newton's force equation, Force equals Mass times Acceleration.
And the equations are really quite similar and that's no coincidence. Whereas Newton was defining force as it related to objects moving at a constant speed, essentially, the planets or objects in freefall here on Earth, Einstein was addressing the motion of particles as they approach the speed of light.
And this helped resolve a major question when it came to physics and astronomy, which had to do with how light behaves. And to break it down succinctly, experiments going all the way back to Classical Antiquity said that light behaves as a wave. You shine it on a wall, you put an aperture in between it, and the pattern that will form on the wall indicates an interference pattern - a wave function.
However, by the late-19th/early-20th century, scientists had been investigating electromagnetic phenomenon. They had been investigating atomic structures and the behavior of subatomic
particles. And thanks to scientists like James Clerk Maxwell, scientists had a pretty good idea of how electromagnetic fields behaved.
They realized, first and foremost that electrical and magnetic forces were part of the same phenomenon, hence the term electromagnetic. They also learned that light was an electromagnetic phenomenon.
And this was largely due to measurements on the speed of light, which at this point had become highly accurate. Today, the most accurate measurements we have say it's just shy of 300 million meters per second. However, it didn't behave as conventional theory dictated.
Essentially, Newtonian mechanics were still very much in favor at the time. And according to Newton, time and space were absolute reference frames, and they were separate from each other.
Whereas objects that were in motion in one inertial reference frame or another, would be moving at different speeds, different directions, and a person in one or the other reference frame would perceive the speed in a relativistic way - hence, the term Relativity - time was seen as absolute.
And so this harkens back to Galileo, which as we addressed in a previous episode, his notion of Relativity, or Invariance, was that if you are in a moving reference frame - like for example, on planet Earth, which is not only rotating on its axis, but revolving around the Sun - then your perception of the motion of other objects will be affected by that.
To use Galileo’s ship metaphor, if you're on the deck of a ship traveling along and you see a ship going in the opposite direction, to you, it'll appear as if that ship is moving very, very fast. And if you were to time it, what you would come up with was the sum total of your velocity in one direction and its velocity going the other. But in fact, you're both moving at different velocities.
And for a person who's in a resting inertial reference frame, like on the shore, they would perceive the two of you moving at your actual velocities in different directions. But time remains a constant factor for all concerned.
So when examining the behavior of light, scientists completely expected that depending upon the motion of the observer, or of the light source, the speed of light would vary. And for people on planet Earth, the fact that we are rotating towards the Sun, that means that if we were to measure the speed of light coming from the Sun towards us, as we're rotating into it, it would appear faster than if we were measuring light coming from the setting Sun, where we're rotating away from it.
However, all the experiments indicated that the speed of light was constant, no matter what you did, it always came out the same: roughly 300 million meters per second. And so scientists began to conduct all kinds of thought experiments. They said:
“Well, there must be something going on in space then. Because if our models of the Universe are correct, and we have every reason to think they are at this point - Newtonian mechanics have explained everything that we can see within our Solar System for hundreds of years - then there must be something out there that is causing light to speed up or slow down depending on the reference frame. And this would explain why we always get the same results.”
But these tests always came up negative. There was never any discernible influence from an unseen force, which scientists called the “aether” or the “luminiferous aether” in space. There was no indication that there was anything dragging on light or pushing light to speed it up or slow it down.
And as I said, throughout 1905, Einstein wrote multiple papers and in addition to his paper on Special Relativity, which was titled “On the electrodynamics of moving bodies,” he also dealt with phenomenon relating to electromagnetic activity and Brownian motion, which has to do with the random motion of particles suspended in a medium such as a liquid or a gas, which included experiments involving Cathode Rays filled with various inert gases and then applying electromagnetic fields to them to see how they behaved.
Einstein also addressed what are known as Lorentz Transformations, which were a series of equations that expanded on Galilean Transformations, which had been published by Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz in 1904.
And one thing that Einstein and other physicists had noticed was that there was a correlation between the equations used by Lorenz and Maxwell's Equations. And so, in his seminal paper on Special Relativity, he attempted to reconcile these along with the Lorentz force law, which is an equation that was developed by Lorenz to calculate the electromagnetic force on a point charge in an electromagnetic field.
So to recap, Galilean transformations, mathematically speaking, these are used to transform between two sets of coordinates which differ in terms of constant relative motion within the context of Newtonian physics. So basically, you're going from one reference frame to the other, and it simply involves the addition and subtraction of velocities as vectors in which time remains constant.
And whereas Galilean Transformations indicated that, for all observers and all reference frames, the mechanics are the same, the laws of physics do not differ between reference frames, Lorentz Transformations indicated that for particles approaching the speed of light (or for, say, a spaceship approaching the speed of light), for anyone within that reference frame, things would appear different in a resting reference frame.
And what this meant was that for objects in an inertial reference frame that is approaching the speed of light, things become distorted along the path of travel. They become compacted, or what is known as length contraction.
And this basically means the length of any object in a moving frame, approaching the speed of light will appear to an observer in a fixed frame (or one that is traveling at a constant velocity) shortened in the direction of motion.
So to summarize, Lorenz was saying that the space and time coordinates of two systems when dealing with high speed phenomenon approaching the speed of light, the space and time are not absolute, that length, time and mass are dependent upon the relative motion of the observer.
And so Einstein took this, applied it to the behavior of light and considered that if space was not the issue here, then perhaps it was time, or the geometry of spacetime itself. And so he theorized that as objects are approaching the speed of light, the flow of time will slow down, as they get closer and closer to it.
And like his predecessor, Galileo, he used metaphors in order to simplify his concepts and make them intelligible. And so in this case, you use the idea of a train. So as he explained, if a person is on a moving train, and they have a set of mirrors, and they decide they're going to conduct some experiments with bouncing light around.
And they hold one mirror up in front of them, and they align it with a mirror at the front of the train cart. Light is going to bounce back and forth from the mirrors, seemingly instantaneously, because it's just that fast.
But if they could slow things down to the point where they could actually see the light traveling back and forth, they would see it bouncing one way, then the other. And the speed of it would be constant, roughly 300 million meters per second.
Now change that perspective. Shift things over to a person who's standing in the field watching the train go by, if they could also see the light move, they would perceive that the light was moving faster in one direction than the other.
And it's because as it's traveling from one mirror to the other, relative to this observer, the light is either moving with the train, or it's moving in the opposite direction of the train. So it looks like it's going faster as it's bouncing back in the opposite direction of the trains travel.
But if they were to measure the speed and actually clocked that time, they would notice that they'd got the same result: roughly 300 million meters per second.
And so, as Einstein explained it, there has to be some kind of interval there that allows the light to catch up so that both observers can obtain this constant speed. And so he's theorized that if the person on the train were to check their watch, and the person in the field were to check their watch, the person on the train would obtain a different result.
They would say that, “Well, since I began measuring roughly 15 seconds have passed.” The person in the field would check their watch, and they’d say, “Well, I got 17 seconds.” And this
effect is known as Time Dilation. For objects that are approaching the speed of light, time slows down.
And this is how the speed of light is able to remain constant in all inertial reference frames. Depending upon your motion, your experience of time speeds up or slows down relative to another person in a different reference frame with a different velocity.
Now, of course, this really only applies to objects that are approaching the speed of light. For everyday interactions, Newtonian/Galilean transformations, they apply. As do the basics of Newtonian physics.
But Einstein's theory was a breakthrough because not only did it indicate that the experimental results are correct, and they can be trusted. But it did away with the need for adding any extraneous ideas or details to the Universe. There didn't have to be aether and space in order for his equations to work. And on top of that, it showed how Newtonian theories of motion could be reconciled with electrodynamic phenomenon.
And so his theory quickly caught on, and it opened the door because... by indicating that time and space were essentially part of a singular phenomenon - that they weren't separate and distinct - and by showing how the laws of physics as we know them, strange things start to happen as subatomic particles or objects approach to the speed of light, this opened scientists minds to a new realm of physics.
And from this, Einstein advanced the two postulates of his Special Theory of Relativity, as he named it, where he said that, “The laws of physics are identical in all non accelerating inertial reference frames,” and that, “The speed of light in a vacuum is constant regardless of the motion of the observer or light source.”
So as Galilean relativity and Galilean transformations dealt with objects moving at constant speeds, Einstein was able to factor in how objects approaching the speed of light and accelerating - how the laws of physics, how time and space would become relative to them. And he formalized it with the equation E equals MC square.
However, Einstein realized that something had to be missing from this, because the laws of physics and chemistry - everything that scientists have learned up until that point - said that energy is never lost. And if time was dilating, if things were becoming compacted in the direction travel, then something did appear to be being lost.
And so as he formalized that equation, he noticed that, “Well, if you exchange energy and mass, if you switch them to the different sides of the equation, well, then what you have is an expression that's telling you that mass and energy are essentially equivalent.”
And so from that, he drew the conclusion that as objects approach speed of light, not only will time slow down for the observer, but their inertial mass - the feeling of how heavy they are - it's
going to increase. Which means that more energy is going to be needed to accelerate them further.
And ultimately, the speed of light cannot be reached by material objects. Because in order to achieve the speed of light, they would have to be producing infinite energy. And if somehow that were possible, they would become infinitely massive. And so balance was essentially restored there.
And this came to be known as the principle of mass-energy equivalence. But another major consequence was that Einstein was saying that since time and space are relative to the observer, traveling through space can alter one's perception of time, essentially meant the time and space are also equivalent. They're separate expressions of the same reality. They're not independent, they're not absolute.
And so this was to have a very profound and revolutionary effect on how people thought and how scientists perceive the Universe going forward. In any case, the annus mirablis, it had a profound effect on his career and the trajectory of his life.
In 1908, he was appointed as as a lecturer at the University of Bern. And the following year, after giving a lecture on electrodynamics and relativity at the University of Zurich, Alfred Kleiner, his former mentor, recommended him to the faculty for the newly created professorship in theoretical physics, which Einstein became in 1909.
By 1911, he and his wife moved to Prague, where he became a full professor at the Charles Ferdinand University and continued to publish prolifically - writing 11 scientific papers in the space of a single year.
And by July 1912, he returned to Switzerland and to Zurich Polytechnic, now known as ETH Zurich, where he taught about analytical mechanics and thermodynamics until 1914, whereupon he returned to Germany and became the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, and a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he would remain until 1932, a year before the Nazi seizure of power.
He was also granted membership in the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Royal Society in Britain. So Einstein star was very much on the rise.
And during the same period, he began looking into how his theories on Special Relativity could be extended to account for gravity. And eventually, this would come to be known as his Theory of General Relativity, in that it was now expanded to include the Universe as a whole.
And as a first step, he wrote a paper in 1907, called on “The Relativity Principle and the conclusions drawn from it.” And here, he argued that the Relativity Principle could be applied to acceleration because gravity is really just that, it's acceleration.
Here on Earth, we're constantly being pulled down at a speed of 9.8 meters per second squared. So if we begin to freefall, every second that passes, we add another 9.8 meters per second of speed to our fall.
And so Einstein argued in what he called the Equivalence Principle, that gravitational mass and inertial mass are the same. And the perfect example of this, another clever metaphor, has to do with elevators.
If you're standing in an elevator, the second the elevator begins to move upwards, it's accelerating for a moment, and then achieves a constant speed. And for that first second of acceleration, you feel yourself being pushed down, or you’re feeling suddenly lighter, depending on the direction of travel.
Now, if you were to cut the cable, the elevator begins to freefall, and you immediately feel like you're being pulled off the ground. Because in the very first second, the elevator will be falling at 9.8 meters per second, thus cancelling out the effect of gravity. And with every passing second, it'll be falling faster and faster, and the person inside the elevator would find themselves being thrown up into the ceiling.
Now transfer that to a spacecraft. Let's say you were standing in a spacecraft, up is in the direction of the nose of the craft, and so when it accelerates, you're being pushed downward. And if this spacecraft is accelerating at a speed of 9.8 meters per second, you feel like you're standing on Earth. The second it stops accelerating, or the second it hits a consistent speed, however, you feel like you're freefloating because the velocity is now consistent.
So in 1911, Einstein followed up on the previous paper with another called “On the influence of gravitation and the propagation of light,” in which he factored in time dilation with acceleration.
And so similar to what he argued with Special Relativity, he said that a clock that would be accelerating upwards away from the Earth would experience time faster than the clock that was sitting on the ground. And so, time dilation is dependent upon an object's position in a gravitational field.
And in between all this he was considering how gravity really needed to be rethought. Because according to Newtonian physics, gravity was action at a distance. Two objects would be immediately pulled towards each other and attracted to each other instantaneously over distances. The rate of that pull was entirely dependent upon the object's mass.
But Einstein began to question that. He thought that, “Well, when it comes to electromagnetism, things work in fields. So what if gravity is not an instantaneous attraction? What if it to is a field?”
And this also agreed with what he had to say with Special Relativity because, as it indicated, nothing in the universe travels instantaneously. Information is constantly being sent out at a
limited speed. Even though the speed of light is extremely, extremely fast, it still travels at a finite speed. And so within all this, a new theory began to emerge.
And by 1915/1916, he had finished formalizing it. And he said that gravity is yes, indeed a field. And instead of objects pulling directly towards each other based on the mass of the two objects, that in fact, gravity generated a field. And within this field, the geometry of spacetime would be altered, because any object that is within this field is experiencing the acceleration that is being imparted on it. And that affects its perception of time. So basically, gravity causes space time within its proximity to bend, it changes the curvature of it.
And he also predicted that light itself would be deflected by this effect on spacetime. So as light enters within the region there where gravity has an effect on space time curvature, light itself will trace that curvatur. It will be distorted or deflected, depending upon the size of the object. And this offered a testable proposition.
And so by 1916, scientists were already taking his theory rather seriously. But in 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington conducted an experiment where he and colleagues traveled to the Canary Islands and observe the Sun during a total solar eclipse. So from this observatory, which is near Earth’s equator, they had a perfect sight of the Sun being completely blocked out by the moon.
And this allowed them to see the starfield around where the Sun usually is, and where it's completely obscuring the stars. And astronomers knew at this point that a certain star would be passing behind the Sun.
So they reasoned that if Einstein is correct, will light from that star should be visible, it should be showing up right next to the Sun. Because the light coming from it will trace the curvature of the sun's gravitational field. And it will appear as if the star is beside the Sun.
And based on Einstein's field equations, they knew exactly where it was supposed to be. And when they observed the eclipse, they found that it was right where Einstein predicted. And so General Relativity became an accepted canon in physics.
And around the same time, Einstein's theories on electromagnetism were having a serious impact on the field of quantum theory, which was really just emerging at the time. Now, as I said, there had been an ongoing debate at this point, about the nature of light, whether it was a particle or a wave.
And Max Planck, he was a very, very important figure in this. In 1900, he wrote a paper in which he introduced his famous Quantum Theory. And this was based on experiments into Blackbody Radiation: radiation released by a black body surface that absorbs heat energy and then releases it or radiates it out as light energy and more infrared radiation (heat).
Classical Theory could not explain what the experiments were revealing. And from this, Plank proposed his famous law, otherwise known as the Planck Radiation Law, which introduced the
idea that energy was released in the form of discrete packets (or “quanta”) rather than in a continuous stream.
And in 1905, Einstein produced a paper titled “On a heuristic point of view concerning the production and transformation of light.” And in this paper, Einstein applied Maxwell's equations to the behavior of light, based on experiments that had been conducted with Blackbody Radiation, as well as experiments with cathode rays and ultraviolet light.
He indicated that based on the results of these experiments, the idea that light was a wave that was continuously distributed in space didn't really hold and that instead, he proposed that light consisted of a finite number of “energy quanta,” which are localized at points in space.
And Max Planck, he and Niels Bohr - another seminal figure in the whole quantum revolution - they initially disagreed with Einstein’s theory. However, they turned a corner after the release of his paper on Special Relativity.
And in 1907-1908, Einstein released more papers in which he argued that Planck's theory of quanta, that all of these packets of energy would have well “defined momentum and would in some respects act as point like particles.” This paper introduced the concept of the photon as the particle of light and it inspired the notion of particle-wave duality.
And in 1917, Einstein published an article titled “On the quantum theory of radiation,” where he proposed the possibility of stimulated emission, which is the same process that allows for microwave amplification and lasers.
This paper was immensely influential and would inspire Erwin Schrodinger, who, in 1926, published his famous Schrodinger Equation, where he used a wave function equation to predict the probability of events or outcomes.
And this is best summarized with his famous thought experiment, known as Schrodinger’s Cat, in which a cat is inside a box with a vial of poison. Now, to the outside observer, this cat may be alive or dead, which they won't know until they open the box. In this respect, while the box is still closed, the cat is in a superposition of states in which it is both alive and dead. It is only by opening the box and collapsing the wavefunction that a single outcome is achieved.
And this described quantum phenomenon very well. In particular, the Double Slit Experiment in which scientists would fire photons or electrons at a sensor mounted on the wall. And in between the sensor and the emitter, they would place a flat surface with two vertical slits cut out of it.
And what the scientists observed in this experiment, when the electrons and photons were allowed to pass through freely, was that they would form an interference pattern on the sensor. So this indicated that the particles were traveling through the slits as a wave, and it created to wave-like patterns on the wall where interference took place at the boundaries between them.
But scientists also found that when they observed the slits directly, using instruments that could visualize the subatomic particles more closely, they suddenly noticed that the results of the experiment changed. Instead of forming an interference pattern on the wall, it formed what looked like point like particles that corresponded to the shape of the slits. In other words, the subatomic particles were behaving like particles at this point.
Once they removed the camera, it went back to behaving like a wave. And upon closer examination of the sensors, they found that the interference pattern, the wave-like function, was still evident. But if you look closely enough, right down to the subatomic level, you saw that the waves consisted of countless little point like sources, countless particles.
And so from this, they drew the conclusion that when observed naturally, subatomic particles such as photons and electrons, they will have a wave like function. It's only by observing them closely that you collapse that function and create a single outcome. This gave rise to ideas like Multiverse Theory, in which the universe is composed of infinite dimensions where each quantum outcome takes place.
Interestingly enough, it was at this point in his career that Einstein began to get rather squeamish about his research and his theories, and the kind of implications they were having.
In particular, he began to feel that the field of quantum mechanics which he helped create, was inspiring a sense of chaos and randomness in the sciences. To this he made his famous quote, “God is not playing dice.”
Similarly, experiments into quantum entanglements, which show that subatomic particles can instantaneously transmit characteristics to other particles, even though they're separated by vast distances, he uttered another famous quote, referring to it as “spooky action at a distance.”
This quote appeared in a 1935 article co-written by Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, titled “Can quantum mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?” in which they asserted that the wavefunction to quantum mechanics could not provide a complete description of physical reality. This came to be known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox (or EPR).
Similarly, Einstein's proposal of general relativity had implications which he did not care for. Einstein was well known for preferring the idea of a Universe that was eternal and unchanging. However, this was not consistent with his Theory of General Relativity, which indicated that the Universe should be contracting.
To address this, Einstein introduced a new concept known as the Cosmological Constant in 1917. The purpose of this constant was to provide a mathematical counterbalance to the effects of gravity that would achieve a static universe.
However, other scientists noted that depending upon the value of the Cosmological Constant, the Universe could be in a state of expansion. Rather than simply holding back gravity, this mysterious force might actually be driving galaxies and the large scale structure of the Universe farther and farther apart.
However, in 1927 and 1929, astrophysicists George Lemaitre and Edwin Hubble independently confirmed that the Universe was expanding, based on their observations of what appeared to be extragalactic nebula, but were in fact galaxies.
They revealed that what many suspected about Einstein's Cosmological Constant was true. In 1930, Albert Einstein visited the Mount Wilson Observatory at the behest of Edwin Hubble, and observed directly what he had discovered.
At this juncture, Einstein formally discarded the Cosmological Constant, calling it “The greatest mistake of my career.” History would prove Albert Einstein more correct than he thought. However, that would not come until long after Einstein's death.
In the meantime, Einstein would go on to make several valuable scientific contributions and bear witness to some of the most amazing and tragic developments in history. More on that in our next installment of Einstein's revolution.
Thank you for listening. I’m Matt Williams, and this has been stories from space