As Albert Einstein was on his deathbed, he asked only for his glasses, his writing implements and his latest equations. He knew he was dying, but he continued his work. In the last hours of his life, while fading in and out of consciousness, he was working on what he hoped would be his most important of all. It was a project of monumental complexity. It was a project he hoped would open the mind of God.
“I’m interested in this phenomenon or phenomena,” Einstein had said earlier in his life. “I want to know God’s thoughts – the rest are mere details.” But while I was there dying in Princeton Hospital must have understood that it was God’s secrets was clearly ready to hang. The greatest scientist of his age died knowing he had become isolated from the scientific community, revered on the one hand, this search ridiculed by the other.
It was a journey that began 50 years ago in Bern, Switzerland. Then – about 20 years – he was a young man struggling to make his mark. Its applications to universities in Europe had been rejected. Eventually his father had retired to the strings to get a job selling third recent evaluation of electrical gadgets. But in his spare time was the development of scientific ideas more extraordinary. In a single year – 1905, a year that became known as the miracle year – published documents to redefine how we view our world and universe.
He confirmed that all matter was composed of molecules – an idea that at the time of the controversy. And the most famous of all, published the document “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” It contained his Theory of Special Relativity and suggested that time – something I had always thought to be unchanging and absolute – is relative. It can speed up or slow down depending on the speed at which they were traveling. This would work an additional period of three pages, completed in September of that year, which contains the derivation of e = mc ², the most famous mathematical equation ever written.
Einstein was on a roll. Ten years after his Theory of Special Relativity, published his Theory of General Relativity – a work widely regarded as his masterpiece. The great 17th century scientist Sir Isaac Newton described the force of gravity with great success, but the cause of gravity remains a mystery. In the General Theory of Relativity, Einstein suggested that gravity is due to the curvature of time and space by massive objects. In 1919, astronomers confirmed this by measuring the bending of starlight around the sun during a solar eclipse.
