Einstein Was Generally Right

Around 100 years ago, a Swiss patent clerk named Albert Einstein published a paper dealing with Special Relativity. A few years later, he developed a General Theory of Relativity which dealt with the interaction of light with gravitational fields. His theory predicted that starlight passing through the Sun’s gravitational field would be bent. Although this idea drew a little laughter in some quarters, less than a decade later his theory was confirmed during a lunar eclipse. This earned him the Nobel Prize in 1921 (back when it really meant something). However, due to the vast distances involved, it remained an elusive task to verify Einstein’s General Theory on the scale of the Universe … until now.

Score one more for Einstein. A new study has confirmed his theory of general relativity works on extremely large scales.

The study was one of the first rigorous tests of this theory of gravity beyond our solar system. The research found that even over vast scales of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, the equations of general relativity predict the way that mass pulls on other mass in the universe. - FOX

Contrary to popular myth, Einstein did not invent the atomic bomb, but did develop the famous equation E = mc² which most folks associate with nuclear energy. He was also not a perfect genius and is rather famous for mathematical blunders in some of his work. Perhaps his biggest goof was his refusal to accept Quantum Theory, which being based on probabilities rather than concrete mathematical constructs led to his now famous quote, “God does not play dice with the universe!“. He spent his later years attempting without success to formulate a “Grand Unified” theory to explain both his relativistic theory and Niels Bohr‘s quantum theory.

A century later, it turns out that both Einstein and Bohr were right, and at the same time wrong. There still is no unified theory to explain the universe around us, just one to explain it on the large scale (Einstein) and another on a smaller scale (Bohr). The entire semiconductor industry is built upon the concepts of quantum mechanics, so just using a computer to make this blog post confirms its consistency in describing the world of the very small. Now we have confirmation that relativity describes the world of the very large. Although Einstein was right, he was also wrong; God does play dice with the universe.