Princeton University Explores Einstein’s Legacy

Princeton, NJ — Princeton University’s Catherine Zandonella writes that, although Albert Einstein was never on the faculty at Princeton, he occupied an office in the University's mathematics building in the 1930s while waiting for construction of the Institute for Advanced Study, and his ideas have inspired generations of physicists and mathematicians at Princeton and around the world.
 
The year 2015 marked the 100th anniversary of the most profound of Einstein's intellectual feats, general relativity, a theory that explains the relationship between gravity and matter.
 
With this work, Einstein unleashed extraordinary new concepts such as black holes, the Big Bang, the bending of light by galaxies, and the rippling of gravitational waves through space, all consequences of the theory and the mathematical equations that describe it. 

​Einstein's theory explains how matter, in the form of galaxies, suns, planets and other objects, creates gravitational fields in the fabric of the universe and how these gravitational fields in turn control the behavior of matter.
 
His ideas, set forth in a series of lectures in late 1915, were almost immediately applied to describe, for example, the unconventional orbit of the planet Mercury.
 
This article was originally published in the University's annual research magazine "Discovery: Research at Princeton."
 
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