mistake that proved by Einstein

To Einstein’s explanation of it. Through his theory of relativity

and long before Einstein the quest for
unification began with the most famous
accident in the history of science as the story goes one day in 1665 a young man was sitting under a tree when all of a sudden he saw an Apple fall from above and with the fall of that Apple Isaac
Newton revolutionized our picture of the universe in an audacious proposal for
his time Newton proclaimed that the force pulling apples to the ground and the force

keeping the moon in orbit around the earth were actually one and the same in
one fell swoop Newton unified the heavens and the earth
in a single theory he called gravity the unification of the celestial with the
terrestrial that the same laws that govern the planets in their motions
govern the tides and the falling the fruit here on earth it was a fantastic
unification of our picture of nature gravity was the first force to be
understood scientifically though three more would eventually follow and
although Newton discovered his law of gravity more than three hundred years
ago his equations describing this force make such accurate predictions that we
still make use of them today in fact scientists needed nothing more than Newton's equations to plot the course of a rocket that landed men on the moon yet there was a problem while his laws described the strength of gravity with great accuracy Newton was harboring an embarrassing secret he had no idea how gravity actually works for nearly 250 years scientists were content to look the other way when
confronted with this mystery

but in the
early 1900's an unknown clerk working in
the Swiss Patent Office would change all
that while reviewing patent applications
Albert Einstein was also pondering the
behavior of light
and little did
Einstein know that his musings on light

would lead him to solve Newton's mystery
of what gravity is at the age of 26
Einstein made a startling discovery that
the velocity of light is a kind of
cosmic speed limit a speed that nothing
in the universe can exceed but no sooner
had the young Einstein published this
idea then he found himself squaring off
with the father of gravity
the trouble was the idea that nothing
can go faster than the speed of light
flew in the face of Newton's picture of
gravity to understand this conflict we
have to run a few experiments and to
begin with let's create a cosmic
catastrophe imagine that all of a sudden
and without any warning the Sun
vaporizes and completely disappears now let's replay that catastrophe and see what effect it would have on the planets according to Newton Newton's theory predicts that with the destruction of the Sun the planets would
immediately fly out of their orbits careening off into space


in other words Newton thought that
gravity was a force that acts
instantaneously across any distance and
so we would immediately feel the effect
of the sun's destruction but Einstein
saw a big problem with Newton's theory a
problem that arose from his work with
light Einstein knew light doesn't travel
instantaneously in fact it takes eight

minutes for the sun's rays to travel the
93 million miles to the earth and since
he had shown that nothing not even
gravity can travel faster than light how
could the earth be released from orbit

before the darkness resulting from the
son's disappearance reached our eyes to the young upstart from the Swiss
Patent Office anything outrunning light was impossible and that meant that two
hundred and fifty year old Newtonian picture of gravity was wrong if Newton is wrong then why do the planets they have because remember the triumph of

Newton's equations come from the quest
to understand the planets and the stars
in particular the problem of why do the