Einstein develops the theory

A key theoretical development for 20th-century astronomy and cosmology was the development of the theory of relativity, from 1905 to 1915, which eventually led to an explanation of the origin of the universe. The theory of relativity grew out of contradictions between electromagnetic theory (worked out by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s) and what people thought they knew about relativity of motion. As a high-school student, Albert Einstein formulated a clever thought experiment and reasoned to a contradiction. According to electromagnetic theory, a light wave consists of changing electric and magnetic fields. Einstein asked what one would see if one could run at the speed of light alongside a light wave. In the frame of reference of the runner, the light wave would be stationary. Hence its fields would not be changing, and consequently the light wave should not exist. Clearly, something was wrong.

There were also experimental difficulties. At the close of the 19th century, it was widely believed that light needs a medium to propagate in (as do other wave disturbances, such as sound). This all-pervading medium was given a name, the luminiferous (or light-carrying) ether. However, several experiments, including the famous Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, failed to detect any motion of Earth with respect to the ether. Many physicists regarded this as a crisis, and some sought rather desperate ways out. Irish physicist George Francis FitzGerald proposed in 1889 that a moving body, owing to its interaction with the ether, undergoes a contraction in the direction of its motion in just the right amount to explain the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment. A similar idea was worked out in greater detail by the Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz.

Einstein’s approach was far more fundamental. In his 1905 paper “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” (“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”), he proceeded axiomatically. He assumed, first, that all uniformly moving reference frames are equally valid for doing physics and, second, that the speed of light is always the same, regardless of the relative motion of the source and the receiver. The first postulate was unexceptional; it was a logical result of the scientific revolution from Copernicus to Galileo. The second postulate was unusual (and one can note how it resolves the paradox of the young Einstein: one simply cannot run alongside a light wave so that it appears stationary). From these two postulates, surprising consequences followed: time runs at different rates in different frames of reference; lengths are contracted in the direction of motion (not, as Lorentz and FitzGerald thought, owing to an interaction with the ether but rather owing to the very nature of space and time); and finally, the mass of a moving body increases without limit as the body’s speed approaches that of light. All this is a part of the special theory of relativity (special because gravity is not included and only uniformly moving bodies are considered).

Many of the same equations had been obtained earlier by Lorentz. In France too mathematician Henri Poincaré was tapping at the door. Relativity was in the air in 1905, and if Einstein had not written his paper, the same basic results would have been obtained. Einstein’s merit was his clarity of thought and his axiomatic approach, which showed that something fundamental was at stake. The ether simply had no place in his worldview. Shortly afterward Einstein’s former teacher mathematician Hermann Minkowski formulated the notion of space-time, in which time is regarded as a fourth dimension. This did not change the equations of relativity theory, but it greatly changed the way people thought about the theory and it helped prepare the way for the general theory.

If the special theory of relativity was bound to happen, the same cannot be said of the general theory of relativity, which is a theory of the gravitational field. Einstein turned to the problem of gravitation shortly after publishing his special theory. By 1907 he had already become convinced that a gravitational field should deflect a ray of light. In developing his new theory, he was guided by two considerations. The first was the principle of equivalence—that acceleration and gravitation are somehow manifestations of the same thing. For example, as Einstein put it, a freely falling man would not feel his own weight. The second consideration was general covariance—namely, the assumption that the laws of physics should take the same mathematical forms in arbitrary frames of reference and not just in uniformly moving frames. The mathematics was difficult, and after years of groping, in 1915 Einstein found the general theory of relativity.

Testing relativity

Einstein had little to go on in the way of observational evidence—only the anomalous advance of the perihelion of Mercury. If Mercury were the only planet orbiting the Sun, then, according to Newtonian physics, the orbit would be a perfect ellipse that would always preserve the same orientation. However, the other planets weakly attract Mercury and disturb its orbit so that the long axis of Mercury’s orbital ellipse is not stationary but rotates around the Sun. The point of the orbit where Mercury is closest to the Sun is called the perihelion; thus, the perihelion slowly advances, in the same direction that Mercury moves.

In 1859 Le Verrier announced that the perihelion of Mercury was advancing a little too quickly to be explained by the action of the known planets. The excess was tiny, about 38 seconds of arc per century, compared with the 527 seconds of arc per century that Le Verrier attributed to known planetary perturbations. Le Verrier had discovered Neptune by means of anomalies in the motion of Uranus. Therefore, he naturally guessed that the discrepancy in the motion of Mercury was due to an undiscovered ring of asteroids, or perhaps a planet, lying between Mercury and the Sun. The planet even acquired a name, Vulcan, but soon proved to be illusory. In 1895 American astronomer Simon Newcomb made a fresh study of the problem and confirmed the unexplained anomaly in the motion of the perihelion of Mercury, now in the amount of 43 seconds of arc per century.

Before he published his new theory, Einstein checked that it gave the right answer for the Mercury problem. In the theory of general relativity, Newton’s law of gravity, in which the gravitational force between two bodies decreases with the inverse square of the distance between them, is not completely accurate in describing massive bodies that are very near each other; rather, the law must be modified by a term that decreases with the inverse fourth power of the distance. The mass of the Sun is not very great, and no planets, aside from Mercury, move very near it; thus, in describing the solar system, Newton’s law of gravity had been quite a successful approximation.

A second prediction of Einstein’s gravity theory was a value for the bending of a ray of starlight as it passes by the Sun. Here Einstein had a bit of luck. In a preliminary version of the theory, the bending came out too small by half. Einstein had tried to get astronomers interested in detecting the bending by looking for apparent shifts in the locations of stars near the Sun during a total solar eclipse. However, for various reasons, including the intervention of World War I, no one had succeeded in making a test. Had astronomers been able to test this early prediction, they would have found it erroneous, which could well have impeded acceptance of the final (1915) version of the theory.

In England, Eddington was instrumental in spreading interest in Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Eddington mastered the mathematics, wrote about the subject, and got his colleagues interested in testing the theory. Eddington and Sir Frank Dyson, the astronomer royal, persuaded the Royal Astronomical Society to mount two expeditions to observe the total solar eclipse of 1919, one to Brazil and the other, led by Eddington, to Principe Island, off the west coast of Africa. Stars near the Sun were photographed during totality, when the Sun’s disk was covered by the Moon, and their positions were compared with earlier photographs made of the same part of the sky. The looked-for effect was small, but Eddington and Dyson confirmed that Einstein’s prediction of the bending of light was correct. Their announcement caused an international sensation.

The third effect of general relativity predicted by Einstein was the gravitational redshift. Light coming from a compact massive object should be slightly redshifted; that is, the light should have a longer wavelength. Measuring this was a delicate business, as the expected shift was small and could easily be masked by other effects. Attempts to measure the gravitational redshift by using absorption lines in the solar spectrum led to contradictory and inconclusive results, but in 1925 American astronomer Walter Adams, at Mount Wilson Observatory, announced that he had determined the gravitational redshift of Sirius B, the white dwarf companion of Sirius. (White dwarfs were expected to have much higher gravitational redshifts than stars like the Sun.) The confirmation of the gravitational redshift not only bolstered general relativity but also helped support Eddington’s theory of stellar structure, which predicted enormous densities (and therefore very strong surface gravities) for white dwarfs. It was not realized until decades later that Adams’s measurement of the gravitational redshift of Sirius B was too small by a factor of four. Compensating errors in Adams’s measurements and in Eddington’s ideas of the temperature and radius of Sirius B had produced a fortuitous agreement (Sirius B is even smaller than Eddington thought). This was another case of Einstein’s being lucky, for a conflict between the measured redshift and the theoretical value could again have compromised the acceptance of general relativity. In the case of Adams’s measurements, a major source of trouble was light from Sirius itself scattered into the Sirius B spectrum by Adams’s instruments. However, by then the effect had been successfully measured in laboratories on Earth with just the value that Einstein’s theory predicts.

In Einstein’s theory of gravity, a massive object produces a curvature of the space-time around it. Einstein made his own early predictions of observable phenomena by using partial and approximate solutions. Thus, Einstein was surprised when German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild in 1916 found an exact solution for Einstein’s field equations for the space-time around a spherical body. For the so-called exterior solution, the Schwarzschild space-time presents mild corrections to the Newtonian motion of bodies (such as that which explains the advance of the perihelion of Mercury). But lurking in Schwarzschild’s solution (the so-called interior solution) are signs of a much stranger regime. If a body is so dense that it is confined to a region of radius less than 2GM/c² (where G is the Newtonian constant of gravitation, M is the mass of the object, and c is the speed of light), the solution becomes problematic: at this critical radius (called the Schwarzschild radius), the solution seems to produce a singularity, where certain mathematical expressions become either zero or infinite. This aspect of Schwarzschild’s solution caused enormous confusion for decades, and astrophysicists tried to paper over the problems by ignoring the interior part of the solution or by seeking coordinate systems in which the problems went away. But in 1939 American physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder published a study of what happens when a star has exhausted its stores of nuclear energy and begins to collapse. Basing their relativistic analysis on the Schwarzschild solution, Oppenheimer and Snyder showed that the Schwarzschild radius does not correspond to a singularity but defines a surface from which light cannot escape to infinity. With collapse, they wrote, the star closes itself off from any communication with an outside observer. This paper helped inaugurate the study of black holes, though these exotic objects did not really come into their own until the 1960s. (The term black hole was coined only in 1967, by American physicist John Archibald Wheeler.) The first plausible candidates for black holes were observed in the 1970s.