Euclide wrote geometry as an axiomatic system. He said if you believe this and this and this, these so-called axioms, you just postulate them. And for the most part, Euclide's postulates for geometry were pretty straightforward. But there was one postulate that seemed a little bit more specific than others. For many, many years, people thought, well, maybe it's not supposed to be an axiom or a postulate. You can't as it turns out.
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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