Albert Einstein

With Isaac Newton’s theory, he suggests that if the sun was to instantly vaporize, the planets would immediately spin off their orbits and fly off into space, but however Einstein had a big problem with this theory while working on light. He knew that light didn’t travel instantaneously but if the sun would to explode it would take 8 minutes for the rays to travel the 93 million miles to the earth. Knowing that gravity isn’t as fast as light, he wondered how the earth could break off its orbit if the rays of the sun hadn’t reached earth yet. After 10 years of research Einstein found the answer, He thought about the 3D dimension of space and the single dimension of time and bound it together to come up with a single fabric of Space/Time. The idea of this is that the fabric is like a surface of a trampoline and it stretched by heavy objects such as planets which then glide along the surface, the warping of this fabric creates what we feel as gravity. He realised that the sun doesn’t instantaneously reach out and grab earth to hold its orbit, but because of the curves in the fabric of space/time. With this theory it can show accurately how the earth would come off its orbit of the sun disappeared. The sun vaporizes which disturbs the gravitational pull and sends out a wave in the fabric, this wave then reaches earth and carry it off into space, much like what would happen if you dropped a pebble in the water. Einstein later found out these waves travel the exact speed of light and so he resolved the conflict with Isaac Newton’s idea of how fast gravity travels. He called this new revelation General Relativity which made him famous in the public and science industry. Einstein’s next mission was to unify gravity with electromagnetism.

Electromagnetism has only been unified a few decades earlier by a man called Maxwell. Einstein thought that if he could unify electromagnetism and gravity that he would have the master equation for everything. His problems would begin by finding out that the strengths of these forces were very different, in fact gravity compared to electromagnetism is very weak. An example of this is jumping off a wall onto the floor, gravity would pull you down but what’s stopping gravity from pulling you down through the ground to the centre of the earth? The answer is electromagnetism, everything we perceive is made out of atoms which are tiny bits of matter, the outside shell of an atom contains a negative electrical charge which repels other atoms, and so the atoms on the ground and the atoms of you repel and stop you from crashing through the floor. The force of electromagnetism is billions and billions times stronger than gravity, Einstein would have an immense struggle to unify these two forces. In the 1920’s a group of people came up with a new way of thinking about physics that would later be called Quantum Mechanics.