NOVA Official Website Inside Einsteins Mind. Inside Einsteins Mind. PBS Airdate November 2. NARRATOR Its a mysterious force that shapes our universe. It feels familiar, but its far stranger than anyone ever imagined. And yet, one mans brilliant mind tamed it gravity. Using simple thought experiments, Albert Einstein made an astonishing discovery time and space are shaped by matter. Watch The Pamela Principle Online' title='Watch The Pamela Principle Online' />Offers news, comment and features about the British arts scene with sections on books, films, music, theatre, art and architecture. Requires free registration. ECHR Judgement Summary sharia law is incompatible with democracy and human rights Source Annual Report 2003 of the European Court of Human Rights, Council of. Season 7 of HBOs Game of Thrones premieres this Sunday, giving you just enough time to figure out where to place your bets in your death pool and how to watch the. Watch The Pamela Principle Online StopwatchCLIFFORD JOHNSON University of Southern California You get rid of this force of gravity, and, instead, we have curvature of space time. JANNA LEVIN Columbia University Right now, the space around me is being squeezed and stretched. NARRATOR He called it the General Theory of Relativity. How did one person, working almost entirely alone, change everything we thought we knew about the universe DAVID KAISER Massachusetts Institute of Technology Einstein is toiling as the world seems to fall apart. ROBBERT DIJKGRAAF Institute for Advanced Study He was able, with pure thought, to solve the riddle of the Universe. NARRATOR Inside Einsteins Mind, right now, on NOVA. Watch The Pamela Principle Online' title='Watch The Pamela Principle Online' />Watch The Pamela Principle Online GamesGravity the most familiar yet most mysterious of natures forces. One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein made a mind blowing discovery what we feel as gravity is, in fact, the push and pull of space and time, itself. He called his idea general relativity. It is perhaps the most remarkable feat of thinking about nature to come from a single mind. CLIFFORD JOHNSON General relativity is undoubtedly one of the greatest scientific theories ever conceived. Its a theory of space, time and gravity. JANNA LEVIN One mathematical sentence, and from it, you can derive the understanding of the entire universe on the largest scale, and that is beautiful. NARRATOR Only now, a century after it was first proposed, do we have the technology to explore the extremes of Einsteins great theory supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies, waves of gravity that distort space and time, the evolution of our entire universe. How did a concept that explains so much come from the mind of one man JOHN NORTON University of Pittsburgh Einstein had a magical talent. He could take a hard physical problem and boil it down to a powerful visual image, a thought experiment. SEAN CARROLL California Institute of Technology Suddenly, he realizes this is how the world works all this abstract nonsense is the correct theory of reality. NARRATOR To gain an insight into Einsteins mind and the true wonder of general relativity, we need to trace the crucial thought experiments that led to his great breakthrough. The seeds for his ideas were planted when he was just a child. Einstein grew up in a small house in Munich, in Southern Germany. His unique personality was evident early on. WALTER ISAACSON Biographer Like many great innovators, Einstein was a rebel, a loner, but deeply curious. Watch Little Murder Online IMDB. He was slow in learning to speak as a child, so slow that his parents consulted a doctor, but he later said that thats maybe why he thought in visual thought experiments. His sister remembers him building little card towers, using playing cards. He was a daydreamer, but he was deeply persistent. NARRATOR Einsteins father, Hermann, manufactured electrical equipment. He nurtured his sons interest in science. On one occasion he brought him a compass. WALTER ISAACSON Now, you and I maybe remember getting a compass when we were kids, and were like, Oh, look, the needle twitches and points north. But, you know, then were on to something else, like, Oh, look, theres a dead squirrel. But for Einstein, after getting that compass, he developed a lifelong devotion to understanding how things can be forced to move even though nothings touching them. NARRATOR The young Einstein became gripped by a desire to understand the underlying laws of nature. He developed a unique way of thinking about the physical world, inspired by his favorite book. WALTER ISAACSON The book Einstein loved told little stories, like whatd be like to travel through space or go through an electrical wire, and it made Einstein think visually. NARRATOR These imagined situations that we often call thought experiments, became a defining feature of Einsteins thinking. DAVID KAISER One of the critical thought experiments that Einstein began to play with, very young, around the age of 1. Its one thing to see, to imagine a light wave zooming past him, at some seemingly impossible speed, but what if he could somehow just propel himself, really quickly. What would it look like if he could catch up with that light waveWhat would he see WALTER ISAACSON He said it caused him to walk around in such anxiety his palms would sweat. Now, you and I may remember what was causing our palms to sweat at age 1. But thats why hes Einstein. NARRATOR This dream like thought about the nature of light was Einsteins first step on the path to his great theory. It stayed with him, throughout his time at school and college. DAVID KAISER He was extremely gifted in science and math, as a young person, and very bad at other classes, mostly cause he kept cutting class and being very rude to his teachers. Many teachers from when. He was a discipline problem, and he was bad news. WALTER ISAACSON He applies to the second best university in Zurich, the Zurich Polytech, and gets rejected,Id love to meet the Admissions Director who rejected Albert Einsteinbut eventually he gets in. And he does moderately well, but not good enough to get a teaching fellowship. And so he ends up at the Bern Swiss Patent Office, as a third class examiner. NARRATOR Undaunted by his university results, Einstein started work at the patent office in 1. Here, his job was to assess the originality of new devices. DAVID KAISER He was immersed in the kinds of, of, sort of, technical details that hed been fascinated by as a very young kid. And here he was, sitting in the kind of wave of, of, of the modern age. This was the era of electrification, so all the latest clever ideas for switching technology, for coordinating clocks, in particular, those were all passing through his office. NARRATOR Time zones had recently been introduced in central Europe, and accurately synchronizing clocks was a major challenge of the day. Switzerland was a world leader in time technology. Dozens of patents to link clocks passed through Einsteins office. WALTER ISAACSON He could whip through these patent applications, and then, out of his drawer, hed pull his physics notes. And his boss was very indulgent and would, sort of, turn a blind eye, as Einstein was doing his theories in his spare time. SIMON SCHAFFER University of Cambridge Its really important to remember that theoretical physics was new when Einstein was a young man. You could do quite a lot of this work by reading a relatively small number of science journals and making the calculations yourself. Einsteins world, in 1. One was about 2. 00 years old, and it was founded by Isaac Newton, a British natural philosopher. For Newton, all there is in the world is matter, moving. NARRATOR Newton showed that the motion of falling apples and orbiting planets are governed by the same force gravity. His equations are so effective, we still use them today to send probes to the farthest reaches of the solar system. The other important theory of Einsteins day covered electricity and magnetism. That branch of physics had been revolutionized, in 1. Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwells theory describes light as an electromagnetic wave that travels at a fixed speed. In Newtons world, the speed of light is not fixed. SIMON SCHAFFER Einstein can see that theres a contradiction between Newton and Maxwell. They just dont fit together. And one of the things Einstein hated, hated was contradiction. If theres one kind of physics that says this and another kind of physics that says that and theyre different, thats a sign that somethings gone wrong, and it needs fixing.