The most beautiful theory
The most beautiful theory
A century ago Albert Einstein changed the way humans saw the universe. His work is still offering new insights today“ALFRED, it’s spinning.” Roy Kerr, a New Zealand-born physicist in his late 20s, had, for half an hour, been chain-smoking his way through some fiendish mathematics. Alfred Schild, his boss at the newly built Centre for Relativity at the University of Texas, had sat and watched. Now, having broken the silence, Kerr put down his pencil. He had been searching for a new solution to Albert Einstein’s equations of general relativity, and at last he could see in his numbers and symbols a precise description of how space-time—the four-dimensional universal fabric those equations describe—could be wrapped into a spinning ball. He had found what he was looking for.This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “The most beautiful theory”From the November 28th 2015 editionDiscover stories from this section and more in the list of contentsExplore the edition