Some of you might have heard in the news recently about the discovery of gravitational waves and how this is the discovery of the century. I’m here to tell you why all this matters.
The complicated looking equation above is what governs you, me and the rest of the universe (thereabouts). This was Einstein’s revelation that changed the way that we now think about how the universe works. Over the past few months I have spent my lunch breaks at work reading about Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, so that I can really understand how the universe works at one of its most fundamental levels. It has been a very long journey to understanding this equation and the mathematics involved is pretty hard-going. Through the help of an absolutely fabulous book titled “A Most Incomprehensible Thing” and about 200 pages of mathematical ground work, I have finally come to admire the ingenuity of Einstein’s infamous field equation. When people think of Einstein they think of E = mc 2 but really the above equation is what made Einstein the man that he is today.
This is the equation that gave us accurate GPS, the Apollo Missions and awesome movies like Interstellar. It’s also the equation that describes black holes and gravitational waves, and tells us how to time travel (gravitational time dilation). Just to note, the discovery of gravitational waves further proves the success of Einstein’s field equation, i.e. they were predicted to exist from the equation.
And the craziest thing about this is that we, as the human race, are able describe the workings of the universe with some made-up symbols that would have no meaning to any other beings in any universe. Literally just a set of symbols describing our existence. An equation that describes how the planets were assembled, how stars were formed and how the fabric of spacetime is BUILT. Is there anything more awe-inspiring?
And to top all of this off, this equation was the result of one man’s mind, one man’s interpretation of how space and time are knitted from the same fabric. (Please bear in mind that he did have a bit of help along the way, especially with the maths. A genius nonetheless).
Although the theory of general relativity doesn’t quite explain the universe in its entirety (see Quantum Gravity), just imagine what the next step for humanity will be, with the collective minds of physics working together to find a theory for everything, using Einstein’s field equation as a stepping stone.
The Inquisitive Orange 