Einstein's Theory of Relativity is 100 Years Old

Has your eye ever been captured by the beauty of a pearl, the milky sheen with just a hint—almost imagined—of blush?  When I first learned what a pearl was and how it was made I thought it was a grand mystery.  I got my mother’s pearls out of the drawer where they were kept, carefully wrapped in tissue and velvet, and stared intently at the large center pearl of the strand.  I imagined myself growing very, very small and diving through the layers of nacre to the center of the pearl.  There I would live in my own tiny world.  In my mind, when I sat on the center grain of sand that was my pearly home and looked at the curved sky of solid, yet seemingly transparent white, to the curved shell of pearly heaven, my world always seemed very large to me, even though I was a spec and my universe only a pearl.  Physics reminds me of that pearl. 

Exactly one hundred years ago, when Albert Einstein unveiled his general theory of relativity, he immediately became the wunderkind of the science world.  His halo of untamed hair became an icon of intellectual rarity and those basset hound eyes were the look of a man who sees what others can not.  Modern discoveries in dark matter, microwave energy and galactic construction have reinforced what Einstein showed us in a simple, elegant equation.

            Microwave energy is a remnant of the Big Bang.  The alternating compression and expansion of microwaves (compressed by gravity, expanded by radiation) produce both sound waves and heat.  If you want to illustrate this principle, take a thick rubber band and rapidly expand and release it.  Listen to the low thumping sound it makes.  On one of the last expansions, touch the rubber band to your upper lip.  It will be warm.  While the heat signature of the microwave background is too delicate to be detected, that rhythmic throb of the microwave expansion and contraction is what cosmologists are listening for.

            What they have found is that what you and I would call, “mass,” makes up only about 5% of the universe.  Another 30 % has been identified as dark matter—physically there, but unseen.  That leaves a whooping 65% currently supposed to be dark energy.  Apparently, dark energy is antigravity.  

            Dr. Margaret J. Geller, a Harvard astrophysicist, proved that galaxies cluster on what appear to be the surface of cosmological bubbles.  Just as soap bubbles coalesce along the rim of connected bubbles, sharing some space side by side while leaving huge arcs of the bubble untouched, so galaxies form in our universe.  So what is in the middle of those bubbles?

            Bubbles, planets, and stars, like my pearls, are all spheres.  Gravity exerts a force that is directly proportional to the size of its mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between it and any other mass.  This force is exerted equally in every direction from the mass itself.  Because of this, objects left at the mercy of their own gravitational fields, tend to form themselves into spheres.  Stars are very large spheres, pearls are very small ones and atoms smaller still. 

Now let’s think about Dr. Geller’s galaxies, forming, as they seem, on the surface of bubbles, and all of that dark energy that seems to be at work in our universe.

            Dark energy is antigravity, pushing the mass of the universe away from itself at a rate that creates a flat, not a pulsating universe.  Would dark energy not have spewed from the Big Bang in the same haphazard and pervasive way as did nascent matter?  Would central cores of dark energy not exert a force equally in all directions away from itself?  Would dark energy not form bubbles of antigravity, with the world of matter occupying the skin of those bubbles where dark energy has stretched itself too thin to counteract the positive gravitation of the world of physical mass?   The logic as well as the mathematics fit together neatly. 

The awesome combination of matter, dark matter and dark energy form a delicate equation that turns scientists into philosophers.  Einstein taught us more than physics, he taught us how to dream.  It is a pearl of perfection.