It still staggers the mind: 5 papers in 6 months that would unlock some of the mystery of the universe and change our lives forever.
By Ronald Kotulak,
After meticulously measuring the Earth's spin for 11 years, two satellites recently confirmed something straight out of weird science--the warping of space and time.
The Earth's rotation drags space and time with it, like molasses pulled around by a spinning bowling ball. Satellites embedded in that whirling space are swept along at a slightly faster rate. But the same stretching of space causes time to travel farther, making it slow down a smidgen.
It was just as Albert Einstein had predicted--space and time are inseparable and fluid, and they get pulled out of shape near a big rotating body like the Earth--though decades would pass before science developed the tools to prove him right.
The research, published last fall, is the latest confirmation of one of the far-out predictions made by Einstein, who began turning the scientific world on its head with an incredible outpouring of five revolutionary theories in only six months in 1905--his annus miraculus, or miracle year…
The world has come to understand and embrace Einstein's theories, but it is his genius that still mystifies.
How could anyone's imagination be so powerful as to penetrate to the heart of the universe and see what makes it tick?
In science, the road to discovery is paved with the right questions, and Einstein had an almost childlike inquisitiveness that led him to ask questions no one had bothered asking before…
(Einstein would never have made his discoveries if he had been forced to conform his thoughts to religiously correct ideas. And without his discoveries, we would not have thousands of the technological advances that we take for granted today. Is that what we want, Americans? To shut down science? Do we want another Dark Age? If we don’t, we’d better get religion out of science. AND out of politics.)
