Tag: spacetime

Relativity’s List of Successful Predictions

When he unveiled his general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein wasn’t exactly met with applause. Almost no one else could do the math necessary to understand his abstract ideas, and at the time he didn’t have any evidence to back it up. But in the century since it was proposed, Einstein’s theory has continued to pass ever more stringent tests.It remains our best explanation of the phenomenon of gravity.

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The theory bears out all sorts of wild predictions, the bulk of which boil down to this: Gravitation behaves the same for all observers, resulting from curving “space-time,” the fabric of the universe.

1 Mercury, the Glitch in Newton’s Matrix

 People assumed that, as with the Uranus solution, another planet must exist even closer to the sun, affecting Mercury’s orbit. The conjectured world even got a name, Vulcan. Decades of searching failed to reveal the scorched world. 

In stepped Einstein. In 1915, his brand-new theory precisely accounted for Mercury’s weirdness, ultimately due to the warping of space-time produced by the substantial mass of the sun.

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