Scientific Popularization (Episode 3): General Relativity

It all starts with an almost trivial intuition, yet one that will revolutionize physics. In 1907, Albert Einstein realizes that a person in free fall does not feel their own weight: if everything is falling with you, then relative to you, nothing is falling. Weight – the cause of the fall – seems to fade away during the fall itself. From this, a staggering idea is born: acceleration can negate gravity, and gravity can be mimicked by acceleration. This is what...