BULACAN STATE

UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF SCIENCE

Research paper
Einsteins General Theory of
Relativity

Submitted by:
BS-Biology IIIA

Submitted to:
Engr. Sergio Buhain

Introduction: What General Relativity is About

General relativity (GR) can be viewed in a number of different ways. Lets
start by briefly describing two viewpoints and how they relate to each other.
General relativity is a theory of the behavior of space and time.
Prior to the 20th century all physics theories assumed space and time to be
absolutes. Together they formed a background within which matter moved. The
role of a physical theory was to describe how different kinds of matter would
interact with each other and, by doing so, predict their motions. With the
development of special and later general relativity theory in the early 20 th century,
the role of space and time in our theories of physics changed dramatically. Instead
of being a passive background, space and time came to be viewed as dynamic
actors in physics, capable of being changed by the matter within them and in turn
changing the way that matter behaves.
In GR, space-time becomes curved in response to the effects of matter. Note
here that in a curved space-time the laws of Euclidean geometry no longer hold:
the angles of a triangle do not in general add up to 180 ; the ratio of the
circumference of a circle to its diameter is in general not p, and so on. This
curvature in turn affects the behavior of matter. In Newtonian physics a particle
with no forces acting on it will move in a straight line. In a curved space-time what
used to be straight lines are now twisted and bent, and particles with no forces
acting on them are seen to move along curved paths.
General relativity is a theory of gravity
Newtonian theory, which held sway prior to the 20 th century, described
gravity as a force. In other words two massive bodies like the Earth and an apple
were understood to exert a pull on each other as a result of the law of gravity. If an
apple started out at rest, say just as it broke off from a tree, then gravity would
cause it to move towards the Earth until it collided with it. Newton's law of gravity
was able to explain in detail not only the fall of apples, but also the orbit of the
moon about the Earth, the motions of the planets about the sun, and much more.
GR can also explain all of those things, but in a very different way. In GR, a massive
body like the sun causes the space-time around it to curve, and this curvature in
turn affects the motion of the planets, causing them to orbit around the sun.
For the most part the predictions of GR and Newtonian gravity are very
similar. There are small differences that can and have been measured in the solar
system, however, to date all the data have matched the predictions of GR.
Moreover, there are certain situations, like the vicinity of a black hole, where GR
makes predictions drastically different from those of Newtonian theory.
In short, GR is a theory in which gravity is described by saying that space
and time are dynamic quantities that can curve in response to the effects of matter
and can in turn alter the behavior of matter.

For the sake of completeness, note here one other way of describing the
content of GR, which is that GR is a theory of physics in arbitrary coordinate
systems. The laws of physics that were known prior to GR, most notably Newtonian
physics and special relativity, were only valid in a restricted set of coordinate
systems known as inertial reference frames. The laws of GR are formulated in a
way that is equally valid in any reference frame.

Curved Space
Suppose you and a friend stand one meter apart from each other facing the
same direction and begin walking. Assuming you both walk in a straight line at the
same speed you should stay exactly one meter apart. The two of you are tracing
out two parallel lines. Imagine instead, however, that you walk for quite a while
and notice that you are starting to drift apart. Eventually you are two meters apart,
and if you look carefully you realize you're not pointed in exactly the same
direction any more. You would presumably conclude that one or both of you had
failed to walk in a straight line.
To test this idea you would need a definition of exactly what a straight line is.
We know that one of the properties of straight lines is that if they are parallel then
they stay parallel, so clearly the paths you and your friends walked on cannot be
straight lines. On the other hand we also know that a straight line is the shortest
distance between two points. So if you were accidentally walking on a curved path
then you should be able to draw a path connecting your initial and final points that
is shorter than the one you actually walked along. To picture this test you can
imagine that you were laying down a trail of red paint behind you as you walked.
You can carefully measure your red trail with a tape measure. Then you can try to
paint a shorter, blue trail connecting your initial and starting points. If your path
was curved, you should be able to make a shorter path.
If you are living in a curved space, however, then you might fail. In other
words it is possible that you and your friend each took the shortest possible route
between your starting and ending points, and yet you ended up slowly turning
away from each other. In a curved space paths that stay parallel to each other are
not the paths of minimal distance and vice-versa. Since there is no path in such a
space that fits all our usual notions of a straight line, mathematicians came up with
another word to use for this situation. In any space, the shortest path between two
points is called a geodesic. In a flat space, meaning one with no curvature, the
geodesics are normal straight lines that stay at a constant angle to each other. In
curved spaces they are generally more complicated.
You may at this point be having trouble picturing exactly what is happening.
If you picture two paths that start out parallel to each other and end up pointing
away from each other then it seems that they must be bending, and they couldn't
possibly be geodesics. This problem stems from the fact that our brains are
designed to think in terms of flat geometry, so we cannot picture a curved space

any more than we can picture a four dimensional space. Fortunately there is a trick
we can use to imagine more clearly how this works.
Imagine very small ants walking on the surface of a globe. Two ants start out
at different points on the equator heading due south. The paths they are walking
along are initially exactly parallel. If neither ant turns then they will continue
heading south until they reach the South Pole. In other words they can start out
moving on parallel paths, walk straight the whole way, and yet end up at the same
point. On the surface of a sphere, the geodesics do not stay parallel to each other.
Such a space, where parallel lines tend to curve inwards towards each other, is
said to have positive curvature. To picture a negative curvature space, where
parallel lines curve outwards, you could put the two ants on the surface of a
saddle. The sign of the curvature is determined by whether parallel lines bend
towards or away from each other, and the magnitude of it is determined by how
quickly they do so. A space with large, positive curvature, for example, is like the
surface of a very small sphere.
We've just used a trick called embedding, which means describing the
properties of a curved space by considering it to be a curved surface in some
higher dimensional flat space. This trick is very useful because it allows us to use
our natural ability to picture flat spaces when trying to understand curved spaces.
There is a danger, however, of taking the embedding too literally. If you picture a
geodesic on the surface of a sphere you might be inclined to think that it's only a
sort of fake geodesic. If I really want to find the shortest path between the equator
and the pole I can make a straight line that goes through the interior of the sphere.
I only called the ant's path a geodesic because I had put on the limitation that it
wasn't allowed to move off the surface. That's true for the embedded space, but
it's not true for a real curved space. A particular two dimensional curved space
might have the same mathematical properties as the surface of a sphere, but that
doesn't mean that it actually has to exist in some flat, three dimensional space. In
fact not all curved spaces can be embedded in this way. So I would urge you to use
embedding as a tool for picturing the properties of curved spaces, but always
remember that it is just a tool. In general curvature is simply an intrinsic property
of a space.
To wrap up this section, I want to note one more property of geodesics, which
is that to an observer in the curved space they will appear straight on short
enough scales. Imagine that instead of an ant on a globe our traveler is once again
you, now moving on the surface of the Earth. Let's assume for simplicity that the
Earth is a perfect sphere with no mountains or canyons. If you can only see a few
miles in any direction then the surface of the Earth appears flat; you would need to
see much farther than that to notice the curvature. In this seemingly flat space you
can draw geodesics and they will look to you like straight lines. If you started
laying out one foot rulers end to end you could circle the whole Earth and at each
point it would seem to you that you were marking out a straight line, yet if you
marked out two such lines that started parallel you would eventually find them
converging.

Space-time

In Newtonian physics space and time were viewed completely separately.

Ask most people how many dimensions our world has, for example, and if they
understand the question they will most likely answer three. In relativity theory,
however, it is conceptually simpler to view time as a fourth dimension. We can't
picture a 4D world, so instead let's imagine that we are one dimensional being. In
other words we live and move only on a line. In that case we can picture spacetime as a 2D surface, where the horizontal direction is space and the vertical
direction is time. The motion of a particle in this 2D space-time traces out a curve,
called a world line.
The world line of an object in a one-dimensional space

Space-time
Here
are
What's
the
particle
would you
What
time?

diagrams such as the one above are critical to relativity.

some questions.
world line of a particle at rest? What's the world line of a
moving with constant speed in one direction?
How
describe the motion of a particle with the world line shown?
does the motion of this particle look like in space rather than space-

The answers: The world line of a particle at rest is a

time (t) moves forward it always stays at the same
world line of a particle moving at constant velocity is a
interval of time, say each second, the position of the
some constant amount. Finally, the world line shown
particle that's oscillating, like a mass on a
spring. As time progresses the particle moves back and

vertical
line.
As
position (x). The
tilted line. In each
particle changes by
above describes a
forth periodically.

Viewing space and time this way allows us to formulate physics in a new way.
Consider, for example, Newton's first law, which states that an object with no
forces acting on it will move in a straight line at a constant speed. Another way to
say this is that the world line of a free object is a straight line.
Be careful not to confuse an object's motion in space with its motion in
space-time. The latter contains more information than the former. For example,
saying that the world line of an object is a straight line tells you not only that its
trajectory is a straight line, but also that it is moving with constant speed.
In Newtonian mechanics the notion of space-time is unnecessary. You are
free to think of space and time as separate things and formulate Newton's laws in
terms of the motion of particles or think of them as unified and formulate those
laws in terms of world lines. In fact the former description is simpler and easier to
work with. In relativity, however, it is necessary to view space-time in a unified
way. In GR this unified space-time is curved by the effects of gravity. Newton's first
law continues to hold in GR, but in a generalized form: A free particle will move

along a geodesic. In the presence of gravity, however, that geodesic will in general
be more complicated than a simple straight line.

Gravity
Consider two objects initially at rest. They could be planets, stars, or
elementary particles. We will assume that they are far enough away from anything
else that they feel no influence from anything but each other. Moreover we'll
assume that they are exerting no non-gravitational forces on each other.
In a Newtonian picture these objects will exert a mutual gravitational
attraction, causing them to accelerate towards each other until they eventually
collide. In GR the same effect will occur, but the description will be very different.
Because gravity is not a force in GR, and we said the objects neither exert nor feel
any non-gravitational forces, the objects should act like free particles, moving
along geodesics. In a flat space-timeno gravitythe geodesics would be straight
lines. In particular, since we specified that the objects started out at rest, their
world lines would be vertical lines. In other words they would always stay the same
distance from each other.
When we consider the effects of gravity, however, we know that the objects
will warp the space-time around them. Recall that in a curved space, parallel lines
do not always stay parallel. In this particular curved space-time, the geodesics
followed by the objects start out parallel but converge over time. Thus the objects
eventually collide. Qualitatively the result is the same as predicted by Newton's
theory, but the underlying description is radically different.
To show how this works more explicitly, Assume for simplicity that one body
is much heavier than the other. For example this could be a description of the sun
and the Earth. That way we can ignore the gravitational effects of the smaller body
and just consider what space-time looks like around a single, massive object. The
space-time diagram for this situation is shown below with a couple of geodesics
drawn in.
Space-time around a massive object such as the sun

The yellow rectangle in this diagram is the sun

itself. Of course the space around the sun is really
three-dimensional, but the spatial dimension in this
diagram is just a line going directly outward from the
sun. Label the spatial axis "r" rather than "x" to showing
only one of the three spatial directions. This means the
geodesics shown are for particles
moving directly towards or away from
the sun. The full space-time diagram would also have geodesics corresponding to
stable orbits around the sun like those of the planets. Bearing in mind that only
one spatial direction is shown; think about why the sun should appear as a
rectangle in the diagram.

The red geodesic shows that an object initially at rest will curve in towards
the sun. Even an object initially moving away from the sun could fall back in if it
were moving slowly enough. The blue geodesic, however, is for a particle starting
out at the same place but with an initial outward velocity large enough that it will
never fall back. Such an object is said to have escape velocity.
This description is all very interesting, but so what? If the measurable results
are the same as they were in Newtonian theory, why invent this new, more
complicated theory? The answer is that the measurable results are not the same.
Qualitatively the behavior described above is the same in both theories, but the
exact details come out slightly different. In particular, you can prove that when you
have weak gravitational fields and objects moving much slower than light, the
predictions of GR are very close to those of Newtonian theory. That had to be true
for GR to be a viable theory because we know that to high accuracy Newtonian
theory had worked to predict the effects of gravity in many situations. When you
violate those conditions, however, the predicted results begin to diverge.

Consequences of GR
Four predictions of GR that is qualitatively different from anything in
Newtonian physics. These predictions are the existence of light cones, black holes,
gravity waves, and the big bang model of the universe

Light Cones
The existence of light cones is a prediction of special relativity even in the
absence of gravity. The basic idea behind light cones is the fact that nothing can
travel faster than the speed of light. That means that if you send a signal out from
the point x=0 at t=0 it can't reach the point x=7 until a time equal to or greater
than 7/c, where c is the speed of light. For instance if my friend is seven light years
away, she can't possibly get my signal before at least seven years have passed. It
doesn't matter whether I send the signal out by radio waves, smoke
signals, or carrier pigeon; 7 years after I send the signal is the
absolute earliest time my friend could see it.
Space-time diagram showing the paths of signals sent out from the
origin, ie x=0, t=0

To see this in other way, consider the space-time

diagram above for a space-time with no gravity. Mathematically this is the limit
where general relativity reduces to special relativity. The bold lines represent the
paths light beams would follow if emitted at the origin (x=0, t=0) either to the
right or left. The shaded region in between these two lines represents all the points
in space-time that you could send a signal to. These points are said to be inside
light cone. For example the point (x=7 light years, t=4 years) is outside the light
cone. Nothing that you do at (x=0, t=0) can possibly have an effect on what

happens at (x=7, t=4) or vice-versa. Note that this light cone is particular to a
specific point in space and time, namely (x=0, t=0). If you were to draw the light
beams emanating from this same point in space (x=0) at a different time, they
would demarcate a different region of space-time.
Space-time

diagram showing the paths of signals sent to the origin

In
light

addition to the future light cone, there is also a past

cone associated with each point in space-time. In the
diagram above the bold lines at negative
times represent light beams that would
reach at (x=0, t=0) coming from either direction. You
should take a moment to convince yourself that the
region in between those two lines represents all the
points in space-time that can have effects. For example my friend at x=7 can send
a signal to me at t=-9 telling me what to do at time t=0, but if she sends the signal
at t=-3 it will be too late for that signal to reach me by t=0.
Light cone in

has
time
light
the

a 3D space-time, (two spatial dimensions)

Finally, for those of you wondering what any of this

to do with cones, the diagram above shows a spacediagram with two spatial dimensions instead of one.
The figure in this diagram represents the paths of
beams moving in all possible directions. This figure is
aptly named "light cone" for the point (x=0, y=0, t=0).

Black Holes
Consider the gravitational field around a massive object such as the sun. In
GR, "gravitational field" refers to the space-time curvature induced by a set of
objects, so we're really talking about what space and time are like near the sun.
Recall the space-time diagram showed before for the vicinity of a massive object,
where geodesics were bent inwards towards the object. Reproduced that diagram
here, only this time showing light cones instead of world lines.
Light cones in the vicinity of a massive object such as the sun

Light, like everything else, is bent towards the object. This means that the
light cones are now somewhat bent, but the
bending is very slight. Recall that the future light
cone shows the limits of the possible world lines of particles. Particles
moving away from the sun cannot outrace the
outgoing light beams. Since these are bent
slightly towards the sun in
the space-time diagram, a signal sent
outward to my friend three light-minutes away from me will take longer than three
minutes to reach her. Conversely a signal sent to my other friend who is floating

three light-minutes closer to the sun than I am could take less than three minutes
to reach him. This doesn't violate the rule that nothing can move faster than light
because the signal must still lag behind a light beam moving towards the sun.
What happens if we consider something denser than the sun? For example a
neutron star is an object a few times more massive than the sun but only about ten
miles across. Very close to the surface of such an object the gravitational field is
very strong, and geodesics are all very strongly bent, as shown in the diagram
below.
Light cones in the vicinity of a neutron star

What happens when an object becomes even denser

than a neutron star? Consider a hypothetical object
with the mass of the sun but a radius of only half a mile.
show below the space-time diagram for such an
object.
Light cones in the vicinity of a black hole. The
dashed line shows the event horizon

The light cones very near the object

are so strongly bent that a light
beam
shined
directly
outwards
cannot escape
from the gravitational field of the
object.
Recall
from above that the light cone
emanating from a
particular point in space-time defines
the region to which one can send a
signal. If you are sitting close enough
to the object
shown above, then any light beam,
carrier pigeon,
or rocket ship you try to send out
including yourselfcan only move closer to the center of the object.
An object so dense that it acts like this is called a black hole because even
light cannot escape from it. The place where the light cones start to turn inwards is
called the event horizon. I've indicated it with a dashed line in the diagram above.
That's the point of no return; if you cross inside the event horizon you can never
get back out again. Remember that I'm only showing radial distance in these
diagrams, so the event horizon looks like a point in space, and thus a line in spacetime. In the full three-dimensional space the event horizon is not just a point but
rather a sphere surrounding the black hole.
On the event horizon, the outer edge of the light cone is vertical. Recall that
the two branches of the light cone represent the paths taken by light emitted in
either direction. That means that if you were exactly at the event horizon and
shined a beam of light directly outward the light would eternally hover at this same
radius. If you were inside the event horizon, the outer edge of the light cone would
actually be tipped inwards. In other words whether you shined light inward or
outward it would still approach the center of the black hole. The motion of any
object is bounded by the light cone. Thus if you are inside the event horizon you
must approach the center.

Inside the event horizon of a black hole. The bold lines show the light cone
and the blue line shows a sample trajectory of an
object falling in

What would that look like to you? If you shined a

light beam away from the black hole would you see
it
turn around and start rushing towards the center?
No.
The light would be approaching the center, but you
would be approaching it even faster. From
your point of view the outgoing
light beam would be moving away from
you at exactly the speed of light. This is a general property of GR. No matter how
strange a given space-time might be, a local observer will always see light beams
moving in all directions at exactly the same speed. This is the sense in which GR
preserves the special relativity rule that says nothing can move faster than light.
Your coordinate speed might be faster than c, but you will never see yourself catch
up to a light beam.
First, consider the massive object in the center. That object is the source of
the gravitational field, but each particle in the object is itself living in the spacetime we've been describing. That means that it cannot stay at rest but must move
towards the center. In other words once an object has become dense enough to
form a black hole it must keep collapsing and getting denser. If gravity were a force
you might imagine some repulsive force strong enough to overcome it even in
these extreme circumstances. As it is, however, no conceivable force in the
universe could possibly resist this pull because space-time itself is so strongly bent
that there are no paths leading out.
In fact you can calculate the maximum time that a particle could possibly
take to fall in to the center of the black hole, assuming it was being pushed
outwards with an arbitrarily strong force, and the result is finite. Thus the object
that formed the black hole originally will keep collapsing down and within a finite
time it will have all collapsed into a single point in the center. Such a point of
infinite density is called a singularity.
To sum up, massive, dense objects exert strong gravitational fields, warping
the spacetime around them. For an object of any given mass, there is a
characteristic radius called the Schwarzschild radius with the property that if the
object gets squeezed into a sphere of that radius or smaller it will become a black
hole. If that happens it will continue to shrink until a short time later it forms a
singularity. The Schwarzschild radius for an object of mass m is 2Gm/c 2, where G is
Newton's gravitational constant. For example the Earth, in order to become a black
hole, would have to be squeezed into a sphere less than 5 mm across.
The event horizon of a black hole is a sphere at the Schwarzschild radius.
Note that as the object inside the black hole collapses its mass remains constant,
so the size of the event horizon remains fixed at the Schwarzschild radius 2Gm/c2.
That means that if we were to observe the formation of a black hole we would see
an object collapse down to within its Schwarzschild radius and disappear. The

theory tells us that the object would continue to collapse after that, but without
going in ourselves to take a look we can never directly observe that fact. From the
outside, once a black hole has formed you can't tell what's going on inside it. This
property is usually referred to by the whimsical phrase: Black holes have no hair.

Gravitational Lensing
When light moves from one medium to anothersay from air to glassit
gets bent. This fact forms the basis for the idea of a lens, which can be used to
focus light.
A simple lens

GR tells us that light rays get bent in the vicinity of a massive

This means that a sufficiently massive object can act just
lens, focusing the light from sources behind it. In fact this
observation provided one of the earliest tests of GR. When the
light from other stars passes near the sun it gets bent, which
changes the apparent positions of the stars.

as

object.
like a

Bending of starlight by the sun. The arrows show the paths of light
rays and the dashed stars show the apparent position of the stars
seen from Earth. The effect has been greatly exaggerated in this
diagram for clarity.

This effect is very hard to observe, first because the bending of

the light rays is very small, but even more so because we can't normally see
starlight close to the sun. We only see stars at night when we're looking away from
the sun. The only exception to this is during a solar eclipse when the moon
momentarily blocks the sun's light. Einstein first published the theory of GR in
1916. In 1919 there was a total solar eclipse and a team of scientists led by Arthur
Eddington traveled to West Africa to observe the eclipse and check whether the
starlight was deflected. The stars did appear to be slightly moved relative to their
nighttime positions in exactly the way predicted by GR. This observation was the
first crucial test of Einstein's theory.
This kind of magnification of a region of space is called weak gravitational
lensing. If the object causing the lensing is massive enough, however, you can
even bend the light so much that you see multiple images of another object behind
it.
Bending of light from a distant galaxy by a (less distant) large cluster of galaxies. The
single galaxy (upper left) appears as two images (upper right and lower left).

The

Gravity

production of multiple images in this way is called strong

gravitational lensing, and has been observed dramatically in
many instances by the Hubble Space Telescope among
others.

Waves

In the theory of electricity and magnetism we know that a changing

electromagnetic field can cause additional changes in the electromagnetic field in
the surrounding space. The result is an electromagnetic wave that propagates
through space reproducing itself continually. The original source of an
electromagnetic field is charged matter, so if you take an electron and shake it
back and forth to produce an oscillating field, you will start a wave that will radiate
outwards into space.
In GR the same effect occurs for gravitational fields. Ripples in space-time
can induce other ripples in space-time in such a way that you get a wave
propagating through space. Thus if you take a heavy mass and shake it back and
forth vigorously enough you will cause a space-time ripple that will radiate
outwards.
What would such a ripple look like? Say you were holding a spherical object
as a gravity wave passed through where you were standing. The space around you
would alternately stretch in two different directions, causing the sphere to get
elongated first along one axis and then the other.

The effect of a gravity wave passing through a circular object

Such an
effect
could
be
detected in principle by measuring the time it takes a
light beam to travel from one side of the sphere to another in different directions.
In the presence of a gravity wave, the relative times in the two directions would
oscillate.
In fact just such an experiment has been built recently. Instead of a sphere it
uses two long perpendicular lines. These lines are actually evacuated chambers
four kilometers long. Lasers are continually fired back and forth along both
chambers. At the intersection of the two lines is a detector that can detect minute
changes in the relative light travel times along the two paths. A regularly
oscillating change would be the hallmark of a gravity wave. This experiment is
called LIGO, or Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory.

The Washington State LIGO observatory

(LIGO also includes a similar observatory in
Louisiana)

To date neither LIGO nor any other experiment

has ever detected a gravity wave. The reason for
that is simply that gravity is weak. Even in the
vicinity of the sun the bending of space-time by gravity is a small effect. Moreover
to get a gravity wave it's not enough to have a massive object; something has to
shake that object back and forth very vigorously. What could produce such violent
behavior?
There are several candidate sources for gravity waves. The most dramatic,
and potentially easiest to detect, are closely orbiting massive objects. Imagine for
example two very dense objects like neutron stars or black holes orbiting around
each other at a very small distance. From the point of view of a distant observer
each of these massive objects would be swinging back and forth in the sky as they
moved through their orbits. The result would be the emission of a strong gravity
wave.
Gravity waves, like electromagnetic waves, carry energy. That means that
the orbiting objects mentioned above would steadily lose energy as they emitted
these waves. When an object in orbit loses energy it tends to fall inwards towards
the center of its orbit. Thus the two objects would spiral in towards each other. This
effect would be very gradual at first, but the closer they got the faster the
oscillations would be. That means the rate of energy loss from gravity waves would
increase, causing them to spiral in faster and faster until they collided. It is hoped
that the last stages of an spiraling pair of massive objects would produce gravity
waves strong enough for us to detect on Earth.
Another possible source for gravity waves is the early universe. In the first
few seconds after the big bang, the universe was an extremely hot, dense soup of
elementary particles. At the very beginning, a tiny fraction of a second after the
big bang, that soup would have been so dense that any ripples propagating
through it could have moved enough matter around to emit strong gravity waves.
If such waves could ever be detected they might give us direct observational data
about processes occurring in the universe within its first fraction of a second of
existence!

The Expanding Universe

From the time of Newton until the development of GR most physicists
assumed that the universe was essentially unchanging, or static. Of course things
change on small scalespeople are born and die, moons and planets move
around, etcbut it was generally believed that the universe as a whole had always
looked more or less like it does today.

Shortly after Einstein developed the theory of GR, he and others thought of
applying it to the question of cosmology, the study of the large scale structure of
the universe. The equations of GR describe the nature of space and time, so in a
sense it was natural to ask what those equations said about the nature of things on
the largest scales. The answer is that the equations have no solutions that are
static on large scales. More specifically, the equations of GR predict that the
universe must either be expanding or contracting.
This behavior essentially comes from the attractive nature of gravity. If you
were to have a universe where all the stars were at rest relative to each other,
their mutual gravity would cause them to start moving towards each other. In
Newtonian physics, it was assumed that the universe went on forever and thus the
attraction felt by any given star would be equally balanced on all sides. In GR you
can show, however, that even in such a case the space as a whole will contract
and the distances between the stars will shrink. The universe could start out
expanding, and depending on how fast it was expanding it might continue to do so
or it might eventually stop and start contracting. It could never stay still, however.
The conclusion that the universe couldn't be static seemed so implausible to
Einstein that he attempted to modify the theory in order to allow static solutions.
His modifications didn't work, however, and it remained an inescapable conclusion
of the theory that the universe could not be static. In 1929, thirteen years after the
publication of GR, Edwin Hubble observed that all distant galaxies appeared to be
moving directly away from us in exactly the way predicted by GR for an expanding
universe.

Conclusion
The theory of GR has brought about one of the most dramatic upheavals
ever to occur in our understanding of the universe. Space and time, long
considered to be a simple fixed background for all events, are now seen as
dynamic, curving and changing in response to the matter and energy within them.
Gravity is no longer viewed as a force but rather as a description of the geometry
of the universe.
Nonetheless, while GR may be a beautiful theory, the ultimate judge of its
value is not its aesthetic appeal but its ability to predict the results of experiments.
Since the theory was first developed there have been a number of high precision
tests of its predictions. I have already mentioned the precession of Mercury, the
bending of starlight near the sun and galaxy images near large clusters, and the
evidence for the expansion of the universe. Other pieces of evidence for the theory
include a change in the speed of clocks near gravitational sources, the observation
of objects believed to be black holes in the centers of galaxies and more. Thus far
in every case where an experiment or observation has been done to test a
prediction of GR, the theory has been shown to be correct.
Meanwhile the early twentieth century saw another revolution in physics, the
development of quantum mechanics. This theory completely changed our

understanding of matter and energy. In quantum mechanics a particle is not seen

as a simple dot existing at a particular place, but as a fuzzy wave existing as a
collection of probabilities for where it could be and how it could be moving.
Taken together these two theoriesGR and quantum mechanicsform our
best current understanding of the physical laws of the universe. The problem is
that you can't take them together. Every attempt that has been made so far to
reconcile the geometric view of space-time in GR with the fuzziness of quantum
mechanics has led to contradictions. The search for a single theory that could bring
these two pieces togethera theory of quantum gravityoccupied Einstein for
much of his life and is still one of the greatest outstanding challenges in science
today.
There is currently one favored candidate called string theory, which
essentially reworks quantum mechanics by treating particles as small strings
rather than points. This simple idea has dramatic consequences for the theory, and
it seems that it may be able to resolve the contradictions of quantum gravity.
Unfortunately it's very difficult to do calculations in string theory, so the theory is
still untested.
Regardless of whether or not string theory is correct, many questions
certainly still remain. The nature of geometry on small scales where quantum
mechanics is important is not understood. It's likely that some of our basic
concepts of space, time, and causality may need to be radically changed on those
scales. The history of the universe for the past fourteen billion years or so is pretty
well understood, but what happened before that is not. Was there a big bang?
What, if anything, happened before it? What will be the ultimate fate of the
universe in the future?
In short, what Newton said about himself hundreds of years ago remains true of us
today:
"I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself
in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst
the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
-Sir Isaac Newton