What if einstein is wrong

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Learn about the Moon in a great new book New book chronicles the space program. Dave's Universe Year of Pluto. Groups Why Join? Astronomy Day. The Complete Star Atlas. Physicists are constantly trying - and failing - to prove Albert Einstein wrong. We take a look at some of his biggest blunders. Quantum weirdness: The battle for the basis of reality Reality, relativity, causality or free will? Astrophile: Trio of dead stars could take on Einstein The first example of a three-star system containing only stellar corpses could be used to probe the nature of gravity.

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Massive objects such as the sun warp the space-time around them, and so Earth's orbit is simply the result of our planet following this curvature. To us that looks like a Newtonian gravitational pull. This space-time picture has now been on the throne for over years, and has so far vanquished all pretenders to its crown.

The discovery of gravitational waves in was a decisive victory, but, like its predecessors, it too might be about to fall. That's because it is fundamentally incompatible with the other big beast in the physics zoo: Quantum theory. The quantum world is notoriously weird. Single particles can be in two places at once, for example. Only by making an observation do we force it to 'choose'. Before an observation we can only assign probabilities to the likely outcomes.

He imagined a cat in a sealed box accompanied by a vial of poison attached to a hammer. The hammer is hooked up to a device that measures the quantum state of a particle. Whether or not the hammer smashes the vial and kills the cat hinges on that measurement, but quantum physics says that until such a measurement is made, the particle is simultaneously in both states, which means the vial is both broken and unbroken and the cat is alive and dead.

Such a picture cannot be reconciled with a smooth, continuous fabric of space-time. According to Einstein, space-time is warped by matter and energy, but quantum physics says matter and energy exist in multiple states simultaneously — they can be both here and over there.

It's kind of embarrassing," she said. Try and use general relativity and quantum theory together, and it doesn't work. One is the highest probability possible — it means an outcome is certain. You can't be more certain than certain. Equally, calculations sometimes give you the answer infinity, which has no real physical meaning.

The two theories are therefore mathematically inconsistent. So, like many monarchs throughout history, physicists are seeking a marriage between rival factions to secure peace.