Category: Physics

Near the end of his life Einstein worked tirelessly to find a way to unite electromagnetism with gravity. He could not, and never did, the notes scattered on his desk scrawled with fruitless probes and useless hypotheticals. Indeed, Einstein passed without even understanding why the two forces could not be united.

It started with a simple experiment that was all the rage in the early 20^th century. And as is usually the case, simple experiments often go on to change the world, leading Einstein himself to open the revolutionary door to the quantum world.

In Einstein’s famous theory of relativity the concepts of immutable space and time aren’t just put aside, they’re explicitly and emphatically rejected. Space and time are now woven into a coexisting fabric. That is to say, we truly live in a four-dimensional universe. Space and time alone cease to exist; only the union of those dimensions remains.

The theory of relativity is at once simple and elegant but also maddeningly nonintuitive. There’s no need to get into the full guts and glory of that theory here, but there is one feature of Einstein’s work that takes center stage, and would eventually lead him into a complete reshaping of Newton’s gravity, altering our very conceptions of the fabric of the universe.

Einstein’s fascination with light, considered quirky at the time, would lead him down the path to a brand new theory of physics.