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Mar 27, 2018 · His new theory would also give us the curious concept of energy quanta: at the atomic level, matter absorbs and emits energy only in discrete “chunks”—not to a continuous degree as...
- Space and Time
- GPS
- Mercury's Orbit
- Gravitational Lensing
- The Big Bang Theory
- Black Holes
- Dark Matter
- So That's Sorted Then... Well Not Quite
In November 1915, Einstein described gravity with the 10 heavy-handed field equations of general relativity, but what those equations basically say is — gravity is what you get whenever spacetime is warped, bent or stretched. Spacetime isn't something we normally talk about, because we think of space (up-down, left-right, forwards-backwards) as sep...
GPS relies on satellites orbiting high above us, where Earth's gravity is weaker (because spacetime is less warped by Earth's mass the further away you go). So the ultra-precise atomic clocks in the satellites run 45 millionths of a second faster per day than clocks here on the ground, deep in Earth's gravitational well. It's not that the clocks on...
Mercury's orbit has always been a little strange — it's got this weird little kink that none of the other planets have. The only way 19th century mathematicians could account for the kink was if Mercury was being pulled on by something else — like the gravity from another nearby planet, somewhere between Mercury and the Sun. But the proposed planet...
Warped space doesn't just affect matter and time — it bends light around massive objects too. The warped space acts like a lens, making things like distant stars and galaxies visible around closer massive objects that should be blocking them from view. This gravitational lensing was predicted by general relativity — and observations of the lensing ...
General relativity says that when spacetime stretches around a massive object, the light travelling through that spacetime stretches too. So light that starts out one colour ends up a slightly different (longer wavelength) colour after travelling through stretched spacetime. This colour shift is called cosmological redshift (red is the colour with ...
One of the earliest solutions to Einstein's general relativity equations was calculated by German physicist Karl Schwarzchild in 1916, when the theory was still hot off the press This result gave us one of nature's (and Hollywood's) great blockbusters — black holes. These infinitely dense remnants of massive dead stars are so tiny, and their gravit...
Dark matter remains one of the big mysteries of the universe. In fact, the only thing we know about it is that it has mass. And we only know that because the gravity resulting from its mass distorts the light coming from galaxies behind it. General relativity tells us how gravitational lensing should affect this light, and physicists can work backw...
With general relativity, Einstein gave physicists the maths that let them make predictions about the universe based on how gravity affected spacetime. It turned their ideas about the cosmos into science. It has passed every test that has been proposed, but there is a problem with the theory. It can never work with quantum theory, which is extremely...
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Dec 19, 2019 · December 19, 2019. Unifying quantum mechanics with Einstein’s general relativity. The quantum nature of gravity is an enigma which has eluded even the brightest of physicists for many decades. Now, Dr Norma G. Sanchez at the French CNRS LERMA Observatory of Paris-PSL Sorbonne Université describes a possible solution.
Sep 19, 2019 · Quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity form the bedrock of the current understanding of physics—yet the two theories don't seem to work together.
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Nov 24, 2015 · November 24, 2015. 8 min read. Einstein's Unfinished Dream: Marrying Relativity to the Quantum World. On the centennial of the theory of general relativity, senior Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln...
Aug 24, 2020 · We have found a new paradox in quantum mechanics—one of our two most fundamental scientific theories, together with Einstein's theory of relativity—that throws doubt on some common-sense ideas...
