![]() In his special relativity theory, Einstein instead showed that the laws of physics and, crucially, the speed of light are the things that are constant.įixing these meant that time and space could vary – and were two sides of the same ‘spacetime’ coin. The first of these was that space and the passage of time are separate and set in stone. It’s all relativeĮinstein solved the mystery by slowly peeling away most of Newton’s assumptions. There was a mysterious flaw in Newton’s perfect clockwork universe. The biggest of these problems was that Mercury’s orbit was a bit off what it should be. But cracks were showing in Newton’s gravity ideas well before Einstein, in his early twenties, started seriously thinking about how the universe worked. Newton’s theory explained gravity in terms of a force of attraction between two masses. It explained everything to do with gravity’s pull, from how, when dropped, a cannonball and an egg will hit the ground at the same time, to why we don’t float off into space. When Albert Einstein was born in 1879, Isaac Newton’s idea of how gravity works had been around for nearly 200 years. ![]()
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