YESTERDAY’S discovery proves that the greatest of all winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics, Albert Einstein, was correct – yet again – in hypothesising that such gravitational waves existed.

In his Theory of Relativity, Einstein’s suggestions led physicists to expect incoming gravitational waves to stretch space in one direction and compress it in another, to put the idea in layman’s language. That appears to be what has been discovered in the USA, so hats off to them and old Albert.

EINSTEIN? NOT HIM AGAIN?

EXACTLY. It often seems that in the last 100 years, every great scientific discovery, and especially those in the fields of physics and astronomical physics, was either predicted by Albert Einstein or at least made possible by his theories.

His greatest work was the Theory of Relativity, which was actually a range of theories that changed and developed after he first published it in 1905 under the title of “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”. In a sentence, the theory suggests that the laws of physics are the same everywhere and can be used to explain the behaviour of everything in space and time.

This theory followed on the work of a great Scottish scientist, James Clerk Maxwell, only in that Einstein took Maxwell’s ideas and added them to his own thoughts on the laws of mechanics so that he was able to say, for example, that the speed of light was a constant.

Without going into too many details, many of Einstein’s relativity theories have subsequently been experimentally verified.

They include length contraction, the universal speed limit, and of course mass-energy equivalence, using his famous formula E = MC2.

One of the most famous theories in his 1905 work was the concept that light was made of tiny particles called quanta. Other scientists scoffed, but not after 1919 when American scientist Robert Millikan’s experiments proved Einstein correct – Millikan won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work.

In the 1910s, Einstein continued to develop the theory of relativity and stated that due to general relativity, light from other stars would be bent by the Sun’s gravity. In 1919, the British astronomer and physicist Sir Arthur Eddington proved Einstein right by his observations during a solar eclipse.

Proof of Einstein’s theories on matter also led directly to the experiments that created atomic bombs and nuclear energy.

SO EINSTEIN WAS SUPER GEEK THEN?

YOU could say that, but he was also something of a flawed human being.

Born into a secular Jewish engineering family in Germany in 1879, Einstein struggled at primary school and was considered to have a speech defect. Perhaps to compensate he took up the violin and played it all his life.

He was spotted as a scientific prodigy at an early age and wrote his first scientific paper as a teenager.

Moving to Switzerland after his family emigrated to Italy, Einstein managed to annoy his professors at the Swiss Polytechnic and instead of becoming an academic he had to find work in a patent office. By then he and his lover Milena Maric, a Serb, had a daughter, and only after his father, who disapproved of the union, died in 1903 were Einstein and Maric married. They later had two sons, but the marriage was not happy and ended in divorce in 1919, the same year that Einstein married his cousin Elsa Lowenthal, with whom he had enjoyed a long-running affair.

His work on the theory of relativity saw him win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 and he became world famous.

Lest it be thought he was some sort of dry academic, he was a renowned womaniser on his international travels.

ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT HIM?

HAD it not been for Einstein, you might have been reading this column in German, or Britain might now be an atomic wasteland. He left Europe in 1933 after being warned he was on Hitler’s death lists.

Thus it was Einstein who headed up the list of scientists who warned President Roosevelt about the Nazis’ potential to make an A Bomb, and that’s why the USA was first to do so. Einstein spent much of the latter part of his life campaigning for nuclear non-proliferation.


‘Gravity has now spoken to us and we understand’


Analysis: Gravitational waves... the final frontier is broken by science