Newton's Theory of Gravity, 1600s

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In 1905, Einstein discovered that there's no such thing as the ether. He never said that his theory of space and time was a part of Minkowski's relativity. That is what Einstein really talked about when he invented special relativity. The very last step along the road to special relativity was by Hermann Minkowski - but I'm using an American pronunciation.

My little pandemic-lockdown contribution to the world was a series of videos called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. The idea was to explain physics in a pedagogical way, concentrating on established ideas rather than speculations, with the twist that I tried to include and explain any equations that seemed useful, even though no prior mathematical knowledge was presumed. I’m in the process of writing a series of three books inspired by those videos, and the first one is coming out now: The Biggest Ideas In The Universe: Space, Time, and Motion. For this solo episode I go through one of the highlights from the book: explaining the mathematical and physical basis of Einstein’s equation of general relativity, relating mass and energy to the curvature of spacetime. Hope it works!

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