Warped reality def1/4/2024 ![]() Tiny ripples in reality, caused by colliding black holes, have tripped sensors in highly sensitive instruments buried underground on Earth. (Astronomers had initially blamed a hidden planet called Vulcan.) Relativity explained the wonky orbit in terms of the warping of space by the sun’s powerful gravity. One prediction solved a long-standing dilemma, a weird wobble in Mercury’s orbit that Newton’s math couldn’t account for. Satellites have shown that rotating celestial bodies twirl the fabric of the cosmos around themselves, like honey twisted by a spoon, affecting the motion of gyroscopes. Super-precise clocks, which tick according to the vibrations of atoms, have verified that gravity alters time’s flow. Waves of light emitted by stars stretch out because of this time bending, and objects closer to a massive object age more slowly. Here are some of the theory’s strangest side effects: But beyond that lies Einstein’s universe, where gravity bends space and time to its will. They only seem bizarre because we don’t notice them in our daily lives - we live, for the most part, in Newton’s reality. Relativity makes numerous bizarre predictions, many of them experimentally verified. (Credit: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo) Their math, laid down in 10 equations, explained how gravity could move around objects via a warped reality, accelerating without ever feeling any mysterious Newtonian forces.Įinstein's inspiration for general relativity struck while he was a patent clerk in Switzerland in 1907. He got help from mathematician Marcel Grossmann, an old friend who shared his notes when a young Einstein skipped class. Confused? The German physicist was, too, and he struggled with the theory for nearly a decade. He described it as a curvature of time and space caused by mass and energy. Newton’s math did a good job at predicting how everything from projectiles to planets moved - but it kept gravity separate from acceleration.Įinstein argued that gravity isn’t a force at all. You may have learned that Newton described gravity as a force, an invisible rubber band that pulls together objects with mass. To link acceleration and gravity in this way, Einstein overthrew one of his own heroes: Isaac Newton. Relativity describes why a clock on a satellite ticks a few dozen microseconds faster than a clock on Earth without accounting for that discrepancy, GPS technologies wouldn’t work. This prediction proved correct when the stars moved during the 1919 solar eclipse. Similarly, he expected a beam of starlight should bend when passing through the sun’s gravity. If the elevator accelerates quickly enough, the beam visibly bends toward the floor.Įinstein showed the same thing happens to a beam inside a stationary elevator within a powerful gravitational field the gravity bends the light. As the light travels sideways, the elevator rises, causing the beam to strike a spot on the wall slightly lower than where it started. Imagine, for example, a horizontal laser inside an elevator that’s accelerating upward. General relativity grew out of Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which describes how the speed of light (in a vacuum) can always be constant.Īccording to relativity, anything that can happen inside of a box picking up speed - i.e., accelerating - also happens in the presence of gravity. This equivalence, “the happiest thought” of Einstein’s life, was his starting point for redefining gravity. His 1915 general theory of relativity built on the notion that gravity and acceleration are not just easily confused, but are one and the same. This spacefarer’s dilemma would have been familiar to Albert Einstein. From inside the vessel, there is - terrifyingly - no way to tell. The ship could be accelerating through space, pressing her into the seat like a race car picking up speed. Her vessel must still be on Earth.īut then a second possibility occurs to her. The only clue is the push of the chair against her body. ![]() Sitting alone in a chair, she wonders: “Where in the universe am I?” An astronaut wakes up in a spaceship, with no memory of how she got there.
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