Our self-appointed task today is to understand the secrets of Einstein's equation. E equals mc squared, which is an equation that popped out of Einstein's formulation of special relativity in 1905. If you're curious as to what the equation is, if you were to say it out loud, it is r mu nu minus one half r g mu nu = eight pi g t mu nu.
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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