Einstein's Accomplishments
Over 100 years ago, if you asked a scientist about the universe they would say it’s eternal, infinite and stable. No beginning and no end. So even asking the question about the origins of the universe was infinitesimally small. But at the start of the 20th century, that began to change. New findings stirred the old beliefs and paved the way for questions about where the universe came from. One observation altered our idea about the true scale of the universe. It started with a mystery in the sky. From the 1900’s onwards, it was known that our solar system was at home in the Milky Way and that was the full extent of the universe. Every star that you could see with the naked eye was in our galaxy. Surrounding it was just a meaningless, empty
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Einstein delivered the theoretical foundations needed to investigate the universe and efficiently develop the science of cosmology. 100 years ago, he proposed his general theory of relativity. It turned physics upside down and gave us a totally new understanding of the world. He suggested that gravity was caused by the warping or bending of space-time by huge objects like planets and stars. His theories were revolutionary. Einstein was a maverick who ignored the conventional to follow his own remarkable instincts. One of his lecturers once told him, "You are a smart boy, Einstein, a very smart boy. “But you have one great fault - "you do not allow yourself to be told anything." Of course, it was this very quality that would allow him to change the world of physics and, of course, to mark him out as one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. And in 1917, he took his general theory of relativity and applied it to the entire universe. By following the logic of his theory, he arrived at something rather unsettling - the combined attraction of gravity from all the matter in the universe would pull every object in the cosmos together, beginning slowly but gradually accelerating until... Gravity would ultimately and inevitably lead to the collapse of the universe
Einstein delivered the theoretical foundations needed to investigate the universe and efficiently develop the science of cosmology. 100 years ago, he proposed his general theory of relativity. It turned physics upside down and gave us a totally new understanding of the world. He suggested that gravity was caused by the warping or bending of space-time by huge objects like planets and stars. His theories were revolutionary. Einstein was a maverick who ignored the conventional to follow his own remarkable instincts. One of his lecturers once told him, "You are a smart boy, Einstein, a very smart boy. “But you have one great fault - "you do not allow yourself to be told anything." Of course, it was this very quality that would allow him to change the world of physics and, of course, to mark him out as one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. And in 1917, he took his general theory of relativity and applied it to the entire universe. By following the logic of his theory, he arrived at something rather unsettling - the combined attraction of gravity from all the matter in the universe would pull every object in the cosmos together, beginning slowly but gradually accelerating until... Gravity would ultimately and inevitably lead to the collapse of the universe