‘If it’s correct, it’s phenomenal,’ said Rob Plunkett, a scientist at Fermilab, the Department of Energy physics laboratory in Illinois. ‘We’d be looking at a whole new set of rules for how the universe works.’
Those rules would bend, or possibly break, Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, published in 1905. Radical at the time, the theory tied together space and time, matter and energy, and set a hard limit for the speed of light, later measured to be about 186,000 miles per second.
No experiment in 106 years had broken that speed limit. The Washington Post online article 23rd September 2011, ‘Particles Faster than Light: Revolution or Mistake?’
Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity shows how speed changes the very fabric of Space and Time. Near the Speed of Light, Time slows to a crawl; reach the Speed of Light and Time stops altogether. The Theory of General Relativity: it’s been called the greatest scientific insight in human history. General Relativity builds on the Theory of Special Relativity and everything it said about Speed. Extreme Universe, National Geographic 2010
General Relativity shined a light on Speed’s role in the workings of our universe. And while it shook the foundations of Physics, it led to a greater understanding of the cosmos. It’s predicted things like black holes. And hints at the existence of a universe where truly strange things might be possible. ibid.
While the world was coming to terms with Special Relativity Einstein had already moved on by himself to tackle the work of the great seventeenth century scientist Isaac Newton. In particular his laws of gravity. Horizon: Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony, BBC 2005
General Relativity was Einstein’s greatest triumph. ibid.
Relativity theory says in general that once you’ve made a time machine you can never use it to go backwards in time before the period it was made. Kip Thorne
Albert Einstein – the icon of genius. His theory of general relativity is one of the greatest feats of thinking of nature to come from a single mind. Inside Einstein's Mind: The Enigma of Space and Time, BBC 2015
A young Albert Einstein imagined a series of thought experiments that fundamentally altered our view of reality. ibid.
This concept that time and space are flexible depending on how you’re moving became known as Special Relativity. ibid.
What if gravity and acceleration are really the same thing? ibid.
What if space/time is shaped by matter? And that’s what we feel as gravity. ibid.
Einstein’s 1935 attack on quantum theory produced a front-page headline in The New York Times and has never been satisfactorily refuted; indeed, as of the mid-1990s, the latest experimentational evidence has breathed new life into the critique.
His greater preoccupation was the ultimate task of uniting the phenomena of light and gravity into a single theory. Einstein never was able, as one biographer put it, to ‘accept that the universe was fragmented into relativity on one side and quantum mechanics on the other.’ Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind