Author(s): New Scientist

Popular Science

WHY GENERAL RELATIVITY LEAVES UNFINISHED BUSINESS WITH THE COSMOS A little over a century ago, a young Albert Einstein presented his general theory of relativity to the world and utterly transformed our understanding of the universe. He overturned centuries of thinking about gravity by revealing how it arises from the curvature of space and time. Yet general relativity has had far greater consequences. It has revealed how our universe has been expanding from a hot dense state called the big bang. It has changed our understanding of space and time. And it predicts that the universe is an extreme place, containing black holes and possibly wormholes. Using Einstein's insights, today's cosmologists have come to realise that most of the universe is in the form of mysterious dark energy. In WHERE THE UNIVERSE CAME FROM, leading cosmologists and New Scientist explain that we still have plenty of unfinished business with the cosmos. How does the dark universe shape our cosmic destiny? What is really happening near black holes? Are we any closer to discovering the ripples in space-time predicted by Einstein? Why is relativity not the final answer?
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