AaS! 132: What did Einstein get wrong?

Ask a Spaceman!

Paul M. Sutter

Astrophysics, Science, Cosmos, Holes, Black, Astronomy, Natural Sciences, Universe, Cosmology, Space, Physics

4.8 • 853 Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2020

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Was Einstein ever wrong? How did he miss out on a major prediction for the universe? What was his major beef with quantum mechanics? How did he go from quantum believer to quantum hater? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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Music by Jason Grady and Nick Bain. Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.

Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Sure, I guess Einstein was kind of sort of smart.
0:12.4	I guess he figured out a thing or two about how the universe works.
0:17.6	He launched a few fields of physics in a single year and completely rewrote our
0:24.5	understanding of gravity from ground up. And while I've gone on and on and on about what Einstein got
0:29.9	right, trust me, I've barely even scratched the surface. Feel free to ask about more of what he got
0:37.0	right. There are a couple things that
0:39.0	Einstein got wrong and not just a little bit wrong, but totally, completely refuse to
0:45.7	accept reality as it is wrong. And I'm going to tell you about two of them. There's one big one
0:51.5	and one small one. Not one big thing and one small thing.
0:55.6	They're both big things, but one is about big stuff and one is about small stuff. It'll make
1:00.8	more sense as we go. And I know I'm spoiling it here, but Einstein was so dang smart that
1:08.2	even in his wrongness, he was still able to make serious advances in the field.
1:15.5	It's, I don't know, there's nothing like Albert, I guess. So let me just dive at right end. The first
1:21.2	wrong thing he got was about the expansion of the universe. In 1917, he finally released general relativity.
1:29.8	His theory of gravity, which is now our theory of gravity,
1:33.4	which relates the amount of stuff,
1:37.2	the stuff and energy and what it's doing in a little patch of volume
1:42.7	to the bending and warping of spacetime in that same volume, and then the bending and warping of space time in that same volume,
1:46.6	and then the bending and warping of space time tells all that stuff, what to do.
1:51.0	That is the fundamental connection in general relativity.
1:56.2	And in 1918, just a year later, Einstein applied general relativity to the whole entire universe.
2:04.2	I mean, who does this?
	...

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