Einstein's Legacy

He was daring, wildly ingenious, passionately curious. He saw a beam of light and imagined riding it; he looked up at the sky and envisioned that space-time was curved. Albert Einstein reinterpreted the inner workings of nature, the very essence of light, time, energy and gravity. His insights fundamentally changed the way we look at the universe—and made him the most famous scientist of the 20th century.

Although he is regarded as one of the most brilliant mathematical physicists of the century, Einstein thought of himself as much as a philosopher as a scientist. Certainly his theories relating matter, energy, space, time and gravity have guided much of the work in theoretical physics since 1905.

His famous "thought experiments," based on intuition and imagination rather than laboratory work, propelled us beyond the mechanistic, unchanging "clockwork universe" of Newton and the other classical physicists into a relativistic universe. Here, in this crazy world, clocks run slower or faster depending on the speed of travel or location in the universe, and "true" distances are stretched or shrunk by gravity. Einstein's legacy is a universe in which space and time are woven into a single fabric -- spacetime. It is matter that causes spacetime to curve and whose motion and properties are, in turn, altered by that curvature.

If all this seems a bit baffling, relax. With a bit of persistence you'll get the gist!

Einstein's college record as an unenthusiastic student is fairly well known. So, too, his independence and questioning of authority, all of which may have prevented him from landing an entry-level academic position once he graduated in 1900 with a degree in physics. Yet despite this unpromising start, Einstein changed the world through the power of his unconventional and extreme imagination.

Einstein had many role models, and one of his larges was the late Isaac Newton. Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity challenged long-held notions about space and time that had been established over two centuries earlier by Newton. He wanted to explore new worlds and find new things out for himself, so he started experimenting and the rest is history, or the future, or even right now!

One of the foremost pioneers of modern science, Einstein's role model, Isaac Newton developed his three laws of motion and a theory of gravity, not to mention the calculus needed to develop and express these theories in math! He set his concepts in a framework of space and time which he (like everyone else at that time) assumed to be absolute. For two centuries that omission was overshadowed by his triumphs in celestial mechanics and optics.

What, in essence, were the key concepts in Newton's theory of gravitation? Masses experience an attractive force between them, a force which acts at a distance, resulting in their acceleration toward each other. The strength of that force depends on the size of the masses and is inversely proportional to square of the distance between them. In Newton's universe, space existed independent of the matter in it. Both space and time were absolute, regardless of the motion of the observer and the matter contained within space. No substance controlled the motions of the moon, Earth and planets; only the force of gravity. But Newton's theory of gravitation was a "descriptive" theory; it didn't explain how the force of gravity was exerted, a fact that has an interesting parallel in Einstein's work and which remains a hot topic for future research.

Isaac Newton's 17th-century description of gravity became obsolete as the clouds parted on May 29, 1919, and the Sun and Moon aligned in an eclipse. Images of known stars confirmed what Einstein's "General Theory of Relativity" predicted: the Sun's gravity acts like a lens and deflects light from distant stars, making them appear in new locations.

Distant distortions: This Hubble Telescope image of galaxy cluster Abell 2218 shows how the cluster's warping of space-time distorts light from galaxies located farther out in the universe.

Newton's laws satisfactorily explained most phenomena studied for the next two hundred years. Toward the end of the 19th century, however, as measuring devices grew more and more precise, the list of puzzling inconsistencies was growing. It was this law that urged Einstein to explore and create. Using Newton's Method, he came up with this parallel universe that uses time and distance to measure things just as our universe does, but it is all relative to the postition of the object during the measurement. It seems extremely complex, but what by Einstein isn't? I mean, we still don't know what E=mc2 means!!

As far as I can tell, Einstein's legacy is nothing but a stretch of the imagination. He loved science and mathematics and everything about them, so he used that love to his advantage to explore new things and create new and exciting experiments that would prove to himself and the rest of the world that with a little imagination and a lot of will power, anything can be done.

"Einstein saw the universe as a puzzle, and he delighted in trying to solve its mysteries. All he needed to contemplate the cosmos was his most valuable scientific tool—his imagination."