 Relativity, that a non-rotating body of electron-degenerate matter above a certain limiting mass would collapse in on itself. In 1939, Robert Oppenheimer and others concurred with Chandrasekhar’s analysis, claiming that neutron stars above a prescribed limit would collapse into black holes, and concluded that no law of physics was likely to intervene and stop at least some stars from collapsing to black holes.
Oppenheimer and his co-authors interpreted the singularity at the boundary of the Schwarzschild radius as indicating that this was the boundary of a bubble in which time stopped. To the outside observer, they would see the surface of the star frozen in time at the instant of collapse, but an infalling observer would have an entirely different experience.
In addition to revolutionizing our understanding of time, space, motion and gravity with his theories of special and general relativity, Einstein also made numerous other contributions to the field of physics. In fact, Einstein published hundreds of books and articles in his life, as well as more than 300 scientific papers and 150 non-scientific ones.
On December 5th, 2014, universities and archives around the world began officially releasing Einstein’s collected papers, which comprised more than 30,000 unique documents. For example, two papers which were published in 1902 and 1903 – “Kinetic Theory of Thermal Equilibrium and of the Second Law of Thermodynamics” and “A Theory of the Foundations of Thermodynamics” – dealt with the subject of thermodynamics and Brownian motion.
By definition, Brownian motion states that where a small amount of particles are oscillating with no preferred direction, they eventually spread to fill the entire medium. Addressing this from a statistical point of view, Einstein believed that the kinetic energy of oscillating particles in a medium could be imparted to larger particles, which in turn could be observed under the microscope – thus proving the existence of atoms of varying sizes.
These papers were the foundation for the 1905 paper on Brownian motion, which showed that it can be construed as firm evidence that molecules exist. This analysis would later be verified by French physicist Jean-Baptiste Perrin, and Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1926. His work established the physical theory of Brownian motion and ended the skepticism about the existence of atoms and molecules as actual physical entities.
Following his research on General Relativity, Einstein entered into a series of attempts to generalize his geometric theory of gravitation to include electromagnetism as another aspect of a single entity. In 1950, he described his “unified field theory” in an article entitled, “On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation“, which describes his attempt to resolve all fundamental forces of the universe into one framework.
Although he continued to be lauded for his work, Einstein became increasingly isolated in his research, and his efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. Nevertheless, Einstein’s dream of unifying other laws of physics with gravity continues to this day, informing efforts to develop a Theory of Everything (ToE) – in particular String Theory, where geometrical fields emerge in a unified quantum-mechanical setting.
His work with Podolsky and Rosen, hoping to disprove the concept of quantum entanglements, also led Einstein and his colleagues to propose a model of a wormhole. By using Schwarzschild’s theory on black holes, and in an attempt to model elementary particles with charge as a solution to gravitational field equations, he described a bridge between two patches of space.
If one end of the wormhole was positively charged, the other end would be negatively charged. These properties led Einstein to believe that pairs of particles and antiparticles could be entangled without violating the laws of Relativity. This concept has seen quite a bit of work in recent years, with scientists having successfully created a magnetic wormhole in a lab.
And in 1926, Einstein and his former student Leó Szilárd co-invent