I just read a short article about Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Today we pretty much yawn at General Relativity, but when you look back at it, it was an incredible intellectual achievement. Einstein took nine years to come up with it. What was so difficult about it was that Einstein had to teach himself to imagine the world in totally different way from what our everyday experiences teach us. And no one was there to help him with this. Newton’s theories of space and time and force and matter pretty much rested on intuitive notions from real life. E.g., you need to use force to get an object moving, or to make it stop once in motion. Since things here on our planet naturally move towards the earth (you can find that out by jumping out of a window – or dropping a chewing gum wrapper), there must be a force coming from the earth that acts on everything near the earth. That’s the way to understand gravity; all that Newton did was to set up some numbers and formulas to allow you to calculate exactly what the effect of gravity and other forces would be.

(NONETHELESS – keep in mind that what Newton did was still an enormous achievement. No one before Newton had thought to set up formulas. Newton’s formulas allowed predictions to be made; for example, if you jump out of a window that is 10 feet high, you might want to know how long will it take for you to hit the ground, and how much force will act on your body when you do hit the ground. Obviously, Newton’s successors found better uses for these formulas, such as figuring out how to make steam engines run and flying machines fly and such.)

If scientists back in Einstein’s time had accurate measuring devises as we do today, they would have known that Newton’s formulas actually didn’t allow exact predictions of force and gravity effects. But Einstein didn’t know that at the time. He was pretty much cruising on his own intellectual gasoline when he came up with General Relativity. Somehow, he decided to imagine the world as a place where straight lines really weren’t always straight, where all of space — and, even worse, time – could get warped like a sheet of rubber. What did the warping was mass and energy. I mean, that was the result of a whole new kingdom existing only in Einstein’s mind. He was eventually able to set up a whole lot of complex mathematics (based on non-Euclidean geometry) to describe this new kingdom in his mind. And guess what? The new Einstein math turned out to describe reality better and more accurately than Newton’s math did.

That’s the challenge of being a cutting-edge physicist today. You have to be trained to see the world in a totally different way, one that leaves behind what you experience in daily life. There is a totally different world existing in your mind, that is shared by maybe a couple of hundred or thousand other people on the planet. You then figure out a mathematical way to describe this complex world of extra dimensions that warp and twist and do all kinds of non-intuitive things. Yea, that’s what all the string theory people are doing right now: investing gobs of mental energy into imagining a new kind of reality, and then describing it through some extremely complex mathematical abstractions; and then hoping that it all turns out to be proveable someday.

When you think about it, Einstein could just as well have been wrong. He might have invented a world in his mind that did not, in the end, reflect what really goes on in our Universe. (I do that all the time! although admittedly, not in the formal, mathematically precise way the Einstein and the string theory people do. And even if you can use matrix math to outline a peculiar kind of Alice-in-Wonderland geometry, it doesn’t mean that it truly relates to anything). But Albert got it right — even though he later got a lot of stuff wrong (e.g., quantum theory). So, hats off tonight to a true intellectual pioneer.