Albert Einstein‘s predictions are still astounding the scientific community more than a century after he made them, both those already confirmed and those we are still exploring, many of them ranging from the existence of gravitational waves, the nature of light as a particle and the possibility of the existence of black holes.
Einstein Set Precedents That Are Still Relevant
Albert Einstein is at the top of the list of the most famous and iconic scientists in history. His theories of Special Relativity in 1905 and General Relativity in 1915 literally revolutionized physics. He went beyond Newton’s theory of gravity, which had been around since 1687.
Einstein also introduced his famous thought experiments, which also tested the incipient developments of quantum mechanics. His contributions in this field merited the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he was awarded in 1921 for the photoelectric effect.
From Solar Eclipse to Gravity
For the scientist, the universe, humanity, and time had unknowns to solve, and some could be solved with everyday life events:
The Day the Curvature of Space-Time Was Observed
Four years after the theory of Relativity, when there was a total eclipse of the Sun, many people located in Brazil and the West African coast took photographs of the stars surrounding the Sun. With this phenomenon, they sought to demonstrate the curvature of space-time.
What they wanted to check was whether the light from distant stars was affected by the curvature of space-time generated by the Sun as it passes close to it, which causes a deviation in its trajectory. The confirmation of this effect, consistent with measurements of the 1919 eclipse, made Einstein world famous.
Another related subject is gravitational waves, these waves were supposed to travel through space-time at constant velocities, which means that distant masses can influence each other, because, according to the equations, what vibrates is space-time itself, and we call these perturbations gravitational waves.
This idea was experimentally confirmed for the first time in 2016 when gravitational waves were detected through a collaboration between the Chandra X-ray Observatory and two space telescopes.
Added to this, the detected gravitational waves were also associated with another of the consequences of General Relativity: they came from the merger of two black holes of about 36 and 29 times the mass of the Sun, and passed through the detectors after traveling about 1.3 billion light-years. Thanks to this, we now have a total of 90 confirmed events, all of which have as their astrophysical scenario the merger of two compact objects: pairs of black holes, pairs of neutron stars, or mixed pairs of a black hole and a neutron star.
The Duality of Light
Another important prediction of Einstein was the dual nature of light. He suggested that light was not only a form of energy but could also behave like a particle. This idea was first confirmed experimentally in 1923 by Arthur Compton.
According to the scientist, this phenomenon with the corpuscular model of light: Each photon, with an energy h-f, collides with an electron and bounces off, emerging with an energy of different function of the angle of incidence and emission.
Is the Universe Moving More Slowly?
Within his theory, Albert Einstein created the concept of gravity, in which he suggests that the distant universe moved much more slowly in the past, and a recent scientific finding proves him right.
The journal Nature Astronomy published the results of a study in which scientists managed to get a glimpse into the early days of the universe when it was about a billion years old and found that things were moving in slow motion compared to today.
Black Holes
Finally, Einstein predicted the existence of black holes. These dead stars collapse under their own gravity and become extremely dense objects. This means that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull. This prediction was first confirmed in 1971 by Stephen Hawking.
This story was written in Spanish by Perla Vallejo in Ecoosfera
