Albert Einstein (1879–1955) remains to this day among the most famous and influential physicists, who developed the general theory of relativity, changing our understanding of light, gravity, and time.
A Canadian physicist and cosmologist, John Moffat is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Toronto, a senior researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo. He is the author of several books: Cracking the Particle Code of the Universe: The Hunt for the Higgs Boson, Reinventing Gravity: A Physicist Goes Beyond Einstein, and Einstein Wrote Back: My Life in Physics.
Q: This month marks the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity known as general relativity. Can you briefly explain what Einstein proposed in this theory?
A: Einstein generalized his special theory of relativity to include accelerated frames of reference. This led him through the Equivalence Principle to formulate a theory of gravity, in which gravity is described by the warping of space-time by matter..
