“God does not play dice with the universe,” he once said. One of the pioneers of quantum physics, the unpredictable science of the smallest particles, he never cared for the idea that the universe was, fundamentally, random. And yet, many times in his life, he resisted the weirder implications of his work. So he was clearly capable of coming up with big ideas and following them through. Many of Einstein’s insights into the universe were the result of his clever thought experiments - he literally revolutionized physics just by thinking hard about it. He was eventually persuaded of their existence again, and of course now we know for a fact they exist, having actually seen them. In the 1930s, two decades after unveiling general relativity, he was set to publish a paper stating the ripples didn’t exist after all. But for a time, Einstein himself doubted they actually existed.

The find also heralded a new era of astronomy, as researchers now have a new way to study the universe. It was a huge validation of Einstein’s work, which had predicted their existence almost exactly 100 years prior.

Two years ago, scientists announced they had directly detected gravitational waves, literal ripples in the fabric of spacetime. And the cosmological constant, as a fudge factor that changes how spacetime interacts with energy, is still a leading contender. When astronomers learned, to their astonishment, that the rate of the universe’s expansion was increasing - that galaxies were growing apart faster over time - they called the mysterious force responsible dark energy. When he learned, in subsequent decades, that the universe is actually expanding, he supposedly exclaimed “Then away with the cosmological constant!” He famously considered it his biggest blunder.īut even Einstein’s mistakes are informative. To make them fit the data, he added the factor, which he named the cosmological constant, into the equations. Everyone back then assumed, based on the information available, that the universe was static, unchanging place, but his equations kept disagreeing. When he was crafting his theory of gravity, general relativity, Einstein needed a bit of a fudge factor. He was human, just like the rest of us, and did make some mistakes. That’s usually the case: Scientists try to disprove Einstein, and Einstein always wins.īut that’s not to say the man was infallible. Recent months have featured a few stories about how Albert Einstein’s theories, or the ideas underpinning them, have all been confirmed to a new degree of accuracy.

Einsteins theories