Hello and welcome to Backchat, a quantum particle in a classical world, a stubborn crease in the smooth fabric of spacetime.

We are here to discuss the talk of the newsroom this month and anything else we want to get off our chests.

I'm Kerry Smith and I'm delighted to have with me in the studio here in London, Davidey Castilevecki.

Hello, I'm Davidei and I write about physical sciences, physics, mathematics, computer science and stuff like that.

I also have Lizzie Gibney. Hello, Kerry. I write here in London about anything to do with physics.

And Daniel Cressy joins us. I'm Daniel and I'm here because they needed someone who wasn't a physicist.

We do tend to talk about physics quite a lot

on Backchat. November 2015 is Einstein month, if ever there was one, as it was a hundred years ago

in November 1915 that Albert Einstein put forward the equations for general relativity. It's a theory

that has stood the test of time. We'll be thinking about whether there'll ever be another Einstein and whether any other theories have the predictive power of general

relativity. As well as being Einstein-tastic, 2015 is also the international year of light and

the international year of soils. Coming up on December 5th, it's World Soil Day. Just a couple of days

ago it was World Television Day, November the 21st. Who gets to decide? What's the impact of these days? And more selfishly, are they useful for journalists? First then, to Einstein and the anniversary of General Relativity. Davida, you've put together Nature's special collection on general relativity. And why not just refresh our memories about what happened in 1915 100 years ago?

Yeah, so it was the time when Einstein was in Berlin at the Prussian Academy of Sciences

and he was in a mad rush to complete the equations for how gravity deforms space and time and how space and time's

deformation affects how planets and other things move, including light.

It was the time when Einstein finally nailed down the right equations.

He thought he had the right equations and he presented four

papers to the academy. There was still no experimental proof of it, but that was a celebration.

And indeed, in the first years after he put forward these equations, no one could really test

anything. It was the First World War, broke out in Europe.

But Lizzie, over the subsequent now 100 years, we've got pretty good at testing this theory,

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