Understanding Einstein: His most significant contribution (includes his own, hand-written notes and comments)

Albert Einstein... one of the most famous, brilliant scientists of our time. Certainly, his fame is well deserved, considering all his great achievements. To name but a few things, he helped invent a nuclear bomb, discovered another state of matter (the Bose-Einstein condensate), and helped understand the nature of light, with his nobel-prize winning interpretation of the photo-electric effect.

This interpretation helped us better understand quantum mechanics. Ironically, Einstein spent the last 20 years of his life trying to prove that quantum mechanics doesn’t exist. I didn’t like the fact that he conducted experiments with a bias, but that’s who Einstein was. He had an artistic imagination and quantum mechanics simply didn’t fit into his mental painting. And I certainly can’t-and won’t-complain because this imagination is what brought about the single most important contribution in modern physics: The general theory of relativity.

This was more than just a theory... it was a perspective. An entirely new way of looking at the universe.

And though this proof is incomplete, it has withstood the test of time. Originally, it was under fire from several scientists, because if Einstein was right, Newton was wrong, both in his theories of motion, and his theory of gravity. So they conducted several experiments (such as the perihelion movement of mercury), and they saw that not only was Newton wrong, Einstein had correctly predicted exactly how wrong Newton was.

Einstein’s theory continued to prevail, time after time. More recently, there was a jolt to the physicists, when an experiment with the Large Hadron Collider seemed to indicate that some neutrinos travelled at speeds faster than light - supposedly impossible according to the theory of relativity. One of the scientists, Prof. Jim Al Khalili, respectfully disagreed. By that, I mean he said that if Einsteins theory was proved wrong, he would eat his boxer shorts on live telivision.

He didn’t have to. Turns out that the clocks weren’t synchronised. Einstein’s theory is still intact.

For Einstein’s own lecture notes on general relativity, 

check out "Einstein's Zurich notebook" (do not forget to go to that link) where his notes along with the explanations are provided:

Einstein's notebook peek!!