Nobel Winners' Work In Physics Began With Albert Einstein
Three scientists won the prize after a 25-year-long search of the cosmos for gravitational waves — the waving of space — the one test missing for Einstein, says astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser.
In 1915, Albert Einstein concluded his General Theory of Relativity, a theory that would revise our understanding of gravity in radical ways.
Before Einstein, the dominant description of gravitational phenomena was based on Isaac Newton's theory, proposed in 1687. According to Newton, every two objects with mass attract one another with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distance: double the distance, the attraction falls by a factor of four.
Newton knew that his theory had a fundamental flaw, a mysterious "action at a distance." Somehow, and he wouldn't speculate how, the force of gravity propagated instantaneously across space like a sort of
