Quotes About General Relativity

Today scientists describe the universe in terms of two basic partial theories—the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics

In general relativity, bodies always follow straight lines in four-dimensional space-time, but they nevertheless appear to us to move along curved paths in our three-dimensional space. (This is rather like watching an airplane flying over hilly ground. Although it follows a straight line in three-dimensional space, its shadow follows a curved path on the two-dimensional ground.)

any normal object is forever confined by relativity to move at speeds slower than the speed of light. Only light, or other waves that have no intrinsic mass, can move at the speed of light.

What you can show using physics, forces this universe to continue to exist. As long as you're using general relativity and quantum mechanics you are forced to conclude that God exists.

General relativity predicts that time ends inside black holes because the gravitational collapse squeezes matter to infinite density.

The math of quantum mechanics and the math of general relativity, when they confront one another, they are ferocious antagonists and the equations don't work.

By the time 1967 had rolled around, general relativity had been relegated to mathematics departments... in most people's minds, it bore no relation to physics. And that was mostly because experiments to prove it were so hard to do - all these effects that Einstein's theory had predicted were infinitesimally small.

The field equations and the whole history of general relativity have been complicated.

general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot both be right,

Evidence in support of general relativity came quickly. Astronomers had long known that Mercury's orbital motion around the sun deviated slightly from what Newton's mathematics predicted. In 1915, Einstein used his new equations to recalculate Mercury's trajectory and was able to explain the discrepancy, a realization he later described to his colleague Adrian Fokker as so thrilling that for some hours it gave him heart palpitations.

General relativity then establishes that objects move toward regions where time elapses more slowly; in a sense, all objects "want" to age as slowly as possible. From an Einsteinian perspective, that explains why an object falls when you let go of it.

No deviations from the predictions of general relativity have been found in experiments performed with our present level of technology.

The predictions of general relativity have been uniformly confirmed. There is no longer any doubt that Einstein's description of gravity is not only compatible with special relativity, but yields predictions closer to experimental results than those of Newton's theory.

Our astronauts, when they go orbiting around the earth, they actually come back slightly younger than a twin that they would have on the planet Earth who was stationary. This is called the twin paradox.

No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you're going to fail.

Accelerating to speeds faster than light was, of course, impossible. General relativity had made that clear enough back in the twentieth century. However, since then a number of ways of circumventing the speed limit had turned up; by now, there were at least six different known methods of moving mass or information from A to B without going through c.

All of this, I believe, indicates that in order to grasp the basic grammar of the world, we need to merge three basic ingredients, not just two: not just general relativity and quantum mechanics, but also the theory of heat, that is, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, which we can also describe as "information theory.

quantum mechanics cannot deal with the curvature of spacetime, and general relativity cannot account for quanta. This is the problem of quantum gravity.

the "singularity" that classic general relativity anticipated disappears as soon as we take quantum gravity into account.

In the context of general relativity, space almost is a substance. It can bend and twist and stretch, and probably the best way to think about space is to just kind of imagine a big piece of rubber that you can pull and twist and bend.

Most of what Einstein said and did has no direct impact on what anybody reads in the Bible. Special relativity, his work in quantum mechanics, nobody even knows or cares. Where Einstein really affects the Bible is the fact that general relativity is the organizing principle for the Big Bang.

For ordinary household gravity, Newton's law works just fine. It got us to the Moon and returned us safely to Earth in 1969. For black holes and the large-scale structure of the universe, we need general relativity.

We have to have a combination of general relativity that describes the warping of space and time, and quantum physics, which describes the uncertainties in that warping and how they change.

When general relativity was first put forward in 1915, the math was very unfamiliar to most physicists. Now we teach general relativity to advanced high school students.