While still a relatively young scientist, Albert Einstein painted a new picture of the universe. Some of his final brush strokes emerged on November 4, 1915 — a century ago today. That’s when this physicist shared the first of four new papers with the Prussian Academy in Berlin, Germany. Together, those new papers would outline what would be his general theory of relativity.
Before Einstein came along, scientists believed that space always stayed the same. Time moved at a rate that never changed. And gravity pulled massive objects toward each other. Apples fell from trees to the ground because of the Earth’s strong pull.
All of those ideas came from the mind of Isaac Newton, who wrote about them in a famous 1687 book. Albert Einstein was born 192 years later. He grew up to show that Newton was wrong. Space and time were not unvarying, as Newton had described them. And Einstein had a better idea about gravity.
Earlier, Einstein had discovered that time does not always flow at the same rate. It slows down if you are moving very fast. If you were traveling at high speed in a spaceship, any clocks onboard or even your pulse rate would slow down compared with your friends back home on Earth. That clock-slowing is part of what Einstein called his special theory of relativity.
