Einstein’s next idea est t anyone est, according to Boorse, Motz, and eaver in tful ory of atomic science.
4o be t is sometery, but David Bodanis suggests itprobably came from tin celeritas, meaning sness. t volume of tionary, compiled a decade before Einsteins to cricket, but makes no mention of it as a symbol for ligness.
“As tion of a single mind,” te, “it is undoubtedly t intellectualac of y,” .
In 1907, or so it imes been ten, Albert Einstein sao t gravity. Alas, like many good stories to beapocrypo Einstein ting in a cy occurred to him.
Actually, o Einstein ion toty, since it to set t one ty. t itdealt ially unimpeded state. But acle sucy? It ion t of t decade and lead to tion in early1917 of a paper entitled “Cosmological Considerations on tivity.”
tivity of 1905 ant piece of as C. P. Snoein t of it ing to toget it,” e Sno is likely t ing for today.”
itrified ein oo splendida figure to remain permanently obscure, and in 1919, t at once ivity developed a reputation for beingimpossible for an ordinary person to grasp. Matters sout in imes decided to do a story, and—forreasons t can never fail to excite t, oneo conduct terview.
Crouc of nearly everyting errors in ion t Einstein o publis only t tion stuck anyway.
Soon tivity ion—and tific establis, it must be said, did little to disturb th.
asked tisronomer Sir Arton if it rue t and Einstein’s relativity ton considered deeply for a moment and replied: “I am trying to t, tivity t it involved a lot of differentialequations, Lorentz transformations, and oted matics (t did—evenEinstein needed ), but t it so tuitive.
In essence ivity says is t space and time are not absolute, but relative to boto ter one moves ts become. e can never accelerate ourselves to t, and try (and faster orted ive to an outside observer.
Almost at once popularizers of science tried to come up o make tsaccessible to a general audience. One of ttempts—comme