Welcome to the Quanta Audio Edition. In each of these bi-weekly episodes, we bring you a story

direct from the Quanta magazine website about developments in basic science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallage. Emmy Nother showed that fundamental physical laws are just a consequence of simple symmetries.

A century later, her insights continue to shape physics. That's next.

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Samir Patel, talks to our writers and editors about more of Quanta's most popular,

interesting, and thought-provoking stories.

In the fall of 1915, the foundations of physics began to crack.

Einstein's new theory of gravity seemed to imply that it should be possible to create and destroy energy.

That result threatened to upend two centuries of thinking in physics. Einstein's theory,

called general relativity, radically transformed the meaning of space and time. Rather than being

fixed backdrops to the events of the universe, space and time were now characters in their own

right. They were able to curve, expand, and contract in the presence of matter and energy.

One problem with this shifting space time is that as it stretches and shrinks, the density of the energy inside it changes.

As a consequence, the classical energy conservation law that previously described

all of physics didn't fit this framework. David Hilbert, one of the most prominent mathematicians

at the time, quickly identified this issue and set out with his colleague Felix Klein to try

to resolve this apparent failure of relativity.

After they were stumped, Hilbert passed the problem on to his assistant, the 33-year-old

Emmy Nother. Nother was an assistant in name only. She was already a formidable mathematician

when, in early 1915, Hilbert and Klein invited her

to join them at the University of Göttingen.

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