“I fully agree with you concerning the pseudo-science of astrology. Einstein’s only known comment on astrology is in a 1943 letter to one Eugene Simon: The real source was the foreword to a reissued book, Manuel d’astrologie (1965), first published by Swiss-Canadian astrologer Werner Hirsig in 1950. It taught me many things and I am greatly indebted to it.” These lines, displayed by some astrology websites as Einstein’s, were exposed as an obvious hoax by the magazine Skeptical Inquirer in 2007. The website Wikiquote has many more entries for him than for Aristotle, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin or Stephen Hawking, and even than Einstein’s opinionated contemporaries Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw.īut how much of this superabundance actually emanated from the physicist? Take this: “Astrology is a science in itself and contains an illuminating body of knowledge. Indeed, Einstein might be the most quoted scientist in history. “There appears to be a bottomless pit of quotable gems to be mined from Einstein’s enormous archives,” notes Alice Calaprice, editor of The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (2011) one detects a hint of despair. Even the website of the US Internal Revenue Service enshrines his words (as quoted by his accountant): “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.” His insights were legion, as we are reminded by this month’s publication of volume 15 in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Credit: Ullsten Bild via Gettyīeyond his towering contribution to physics, Albert Einstein was an avid commentator on education, marriage, money, the nature of genius, music-making, politics and more. NASA's Imagine the UniverseĮinstein’s theory has been confirmed by more than a century of experiments, starting with one involving a 1919 solar eclipse in which the path of light from distant stars was shifted by the sun’s intense gravitation - by just the amount Einstein had predicted.Albert Einstein in Caputh, Germany, in 1929. Like all massive objects, the Earth warps the fabric of space. In Einstein’s view, Mercury might look like a marble forever circling the bottom of a drain.

It showed that the sun so curves space that it distorts the orbits of nearby bodies, including Mercury. This new model solved the Mercury problem. It creates a depression that draws the planets close. Think of the sun as a bowling ball on a mattress. Instead of exerting an attractive force, he reasoned that each object curves the fabric of space and time around them, forming a sort of well that other objects - and even beams of light - fall into. The orbits of planets shift over time, and Mercury’s orbit shifted faster than Newton predicted.Įinstein offered a different view of gravity, one that made sense of Mercury.

But Newton's view of gravity didn't work for some things, like Mercury’s peculiar orbit around the sun.

Relativity by einstein