Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does so much interesting stuff exist in the universe? Particle physicist Harry Cliff works on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and he has some...
========== A hundred years ago this month,
a 36-year-old Albert Einstein stood up in front of the Prussian
Academy of Sciences in Berlin to present a radical new theory
of space, time and gravity: the general theory of relativity. General relativity is unquestionably
Einstein's masterpiece, a theory which reveals the workings
of the universe at the grandest scales, capturing in one beautiful line of algebra everything from why apples fall from trees
to the beginning of time and space. 1915 must have been an exciting year
to be a physicist. Two new ideas were turning
the subject on its head. One was Einstein's theory of relativity, the other was arguably
even more revolutionary: quantum mechanics, a mind-meltingly strange
yet stunningly successful new way...