There are a lot of forces at work at Daily Kos recently, as people gravitate toward their candidate of choice. The push and shove has been playing out in the Recommend Diaries. But, in the General it all becomes Relative.
OK, enough of my word games, because none of that has anything to do with this diary. :-)
On this date, March 20, 1726, Sir Issac Newton died, but his theory of gravity would live on for another 190 years. In fact it was exactly 190 later on March 20, 1916 that Albert Einstein published “Die Grundlage der Allgemeinen Relativitatstheorie” better know to us non-German speaking people as General Relativity. That is right, it was 100 years ago today that gravity stopped being:
and became:
Newton theorized that gravity was an innate universal force that all objects have. The moon is pulling the Earth just as the Earth is pulling the Moon. But because the Earth is so much more massive the center of rotation of the two objects in below the Earth’s surface. It works relatively well for our solar system, but starts to fray around the edges for the Universe.
Einstein's Theory of General Relativity
Albert Einstein, in his theory of special relativity, determined that the laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers, and he showed that the speed of light within a vacuum is the same no matter the speed at which an observer travels. As a result, he found that space and time were interwoven into a single continuum known as space-time. Events that occur at the same time for one observer could occur at different times for another.
As he worked out the equations for his general theory of relativity, Einstein realized that massive objects caused a distortion in space-time. Imagine setting a large body in the center of a trampoline. The body would press down into the fabric, causing it to dimple. A marble rolled around the edge would spiral inward toward the body, pulled in much the same way that the gravity of a planet pulls at rocks in space.
Earlier this year, Einstein was proving right (although not everyone agrees).
Gravitational Waves Detected, Confirming Einstein’s Theory
A team of scientists announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago. (Listen to it here.) It completes his vision of a universe in which space and time are interwoven and dynamic, able to stretch, shrink and jiggle. And it is a ringing confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape, which were the most foreboding (and unwelcome) part of his theory.
[I am not sure the sound link above works so you can listen to the gravitational wave here.]