4.8 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 21 July 2020
⏱️ 36 minutes
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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).
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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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