Even first-hand instruction by Einstein himself doesn't always help, as Chaim Weizmann commented when he took a long Atlantic crossing with Einstein in 1921: " Einstein explained his theory to me every day," Weizmann said, "and on my arrival I was fully convinced that he understood it."

The famous equation suggests that tiny amounts of mass could be converted into huge amounts of energy and presaged the development of nuclear power. Einstein's 1905 work on relativity remained controversial for many years, but after many experiments proved it to be true it was eventually accepted by leading physicists, starting with the famous Max Planck who is considered to be the founder of Quantum Theory.

In November of 1919, Albert Einstein became an overnight celebrity, thanks to a solar eclipse. An experiment had confirmed that light rays from distant Stars were deflected by the gravity of the Sun in just the amount he had predicted in his theory of gravity, general relativity.
General Relativity was the first major new theory of gravity since Isaac Newton's more than 250 years earlier .However, Einstein later considered his 1917 paper founding cosmology as a "blunder". The theory of general relativity predicted an expanding or contracting Universe, but Einstein wanted a Universe which is an unchanging three dimensional sphere, like the surface of a three dimensional ball in four dimensions, but this type of Universe is not consistent with his own theory of relativity

He stabilized his solution by introducing a new notion, the cosmological constant, and when the Universe was shown to be expanding, he retracted the constant as a "blunder".
This is not really much of a blunder however, as the cosmological constant is necessary within general relativity as it is currently understood. General Relativity may be the biggest leap of the scientific imagination in history. Unlike many previous scientific breakthroughs, such as the principle of natural selection, or the discovery of the physical existence of atoms, General Relativity had little foundation upon the theories or experiments of the time. No one except Einstein was thinking of Gravity as equivalent to acceleration, as a geometrical phenomenon, or as a bending of time and space. Although it is impossible to know, many physicists believe that without Einstein, it could have been another few decades or more before another physicist worked out the concepts and mathematics of General Relativity.

So, Einstein may have been right after all there really is a repulsive form of Gravity in space. Einstein first conceived of the notion of a repulsive force in space in his attempt to balance the Universe against the inward pull of its own Gravity, which he thought would ultimately cause the Universe to implode. His "Cosmological Constant" to represent the possibility that even empty space has energy and couples to Gravity. Like other astronomers of the time, he thought that the Universe was static and so proposed there was a repulsive force from space that kept the Universe in balance. Einstein discarded his own findings in 1929, when Edwin Hubble found through his research that the Universe was expanding and not static. Today, new data from Hubble may well prove Einstein was on the right track. It was Dr Adam Riess and the members of the High-z Supernova Team and the Supernova Cosmology Project who used the ground-based telescopes and Hubble to detect the acceleration of the expansion of space from observations of distant supernovae.

Disputed Consent

In 1978, Einstein's brain was rediscovered in the possession of Dr. Harvey by journalist Steven Levy. The brain sections had been preserved in alcohol in two large mason jars within a cider box for over 20 years...what a way to go!

Einstein Quotes:

• "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."
• "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
• "Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."
• "I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details."
• "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
• "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
• "The only real valuable thing is intuition."
• "A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."
• "I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice."
• "God is subtle but he is not malicious."

 

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