The BBVA Foundation marks the centenary year of general relativity with a lecture by the academician and science historian
General relativity, “the most beautiful, original theory of the universe,”also had its wilderness years, according to Einstein expert Sánchez Ron
· “The Birth, Death and Resurrection of General Relativity: From the Equivalence Principle to Black Holes” will be streamed live on www.fbbva.es, since seats at the event are already fully booked
· For Sánchez Ron, the General Theory of Relativity “changed the way we understand reality”
· The lecture coincides with the launch of José Manuel Sánchez Ron’s book titled Albert Einstein. Su vida, su obra y su mundo, co-published by Crítica and the BBVA Foundation
Madrid, November 24, 2015.- November 25 exactly one hundred years ago. A physicist aged just thirty-six, a member of the Prussian Academy of Science and holder of a non-teaching chair at the University of Berlin, unveils a theory that will revolutionize the concepts of space and time, and shake the foundations of the physical sciences. The theory known as general relativity was a product of the unique, extraordinarily creative mind of its author, Albert Einstein, and the predictions it made ran in a wholly unexpected direction. A few years later, the arrival of the first experimental verification of a never-observed effect confirmed the admiration of his colleagues and turned the man himself into a cultural icon. While general relativity transformed science’s conception of the universe, Einstein became a universal symbol of intelligence and creativity.
Tonight, the BBVA Foundation will celebrate a century of the General Theory of Relativity with a lecture by José Manuel Sánchez Ron, Professor of Science History at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, member of the Real Academia Española and winner of Spain’s 2015 National Essay Prize. As no seats remain due to intense public demand, the lecture will be live-streamed at 19:30 on the BBVA Foundation website (www.fbbva.es), with the recorded broadcast available a few days later.
The lecture will coincide with the release of José Manual Sánchez Ron’s latest book titled Albert Einstein. Su vida, su obra y su mundo. Co-published by Crítica and Fundación BBVA, the book not only explains Einstein’s science, but explores his personal universe and social and historical context with a depth of detail unprecedented among Spanish-language publications. The BBVA Foundation website will shortly offer free access to the first two chapters.
For Sánchez Ron, the General Theory of Relativity is “the most original and beautiful theory in the history of science, as well as being physically and philosophically profound. It changed the way we understand reality, not something we can say of many scientific formulations. We live in a world full of celebrations, but this is one that is truly deserved.”
Sánchez Ron relates that, shortly after its completion, Einstein himself enthused in a letter to a friend that “the theory is beautiful beyond comparison.”
The General Theory of Relativity describes space-time as a structure which is bent through the effect of the mass and energy in the universe, rather as an object placed on a elasticated cloth stretches the fabric and causes it to sag –to a greater or lesser extent according to the object’s mass. The space-time curvature affects the entire universe, including light, and gives rise to counter-intuitive manifestations: the best known being black holes, for a long time considered exotic theoretical constructions and now a verified reality.
Sánchez Ron’s talk is titled “The Birth, Death and Resurrection of General Relativity: From the Equivalence Principle to Black Holes”. In it, he describes Einstein’s personal, scientific and historical context when he was working on his theory, and how it hit the world press headlines in record time, turning him into nothing less than a cultural celebrity.
The theory predicts that light rays will bend as they pass through a gravitational field. And a British scientific expedition was able to observationally verify this effect during the solar eclipse of May 29, 1919. On the day after its results were published, on November 7, 1919, the words emblazoned across the front page of The Times newspaper were: “REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE. New Theory of the Universe. Newtonian Ideas Overthrown.”
“So Albert Einstein was suddenly a world famous person, a celebrity,” remarks Sánchez Ron, who illustrates his point with images of the triumphal reception the physicist was accorded by the citizens of New York.
The birth of modern cosmology and the theory’s wilderness years
In the decades that followed, the scientific community got on with digesting the theory and its implications. Einstein himself studied how to apply it to the universe as a whole, since gravity is the force determining its large-scale structure. As such he played a vital role in the birth of modern cosmology – indeed it was general relativity that provided the theoretical underpinning for Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery that the universe is expanding.
But the theory also had its wilderness years, as Sánchez Ron describes them, during which it was only worked on from a strictly mathematical standpoint. “However widely admired for its originality and beauty, when Einstein died its star was in decline,” he says. “Then, and for some time after, it was left to the structural explorations of mathematicians, adrift from the concerns of the majority of physicists, immersed in the problems of quantum physics.”
It was discoveries in astrophysics made after Einstein’s death that prompted the “resurrection” of the General Theory of Relativity, which offered the only fit for the new observations.
In the 1960s the world discovered quasars, highly energetic objects despite their distance which we now know owe their intense brightness to the activity of a central black hole, and pulsars, neutron stars that rotate on their axis thousands of times per second. Then in 1979 came the detection of the first gravitational lens, a phenomenon predicted by Einstein in which a supermassive object, like a galaxy cluster, bends space-time so much that we can see the light of objects hidden on the other side.
General relativity has withstood every test thrown at it, and there is no doubt that it right now offers the best scientific description of gravity: of the four fundamental forces, the one – Sánchez Ron reminds us – “that we are most aware of, that accompanies us in our daily lives.”
José Manuel Sánchez Ron
José Manuel Sánchez Ron holds a degree in physics from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and a PhD in the same subject from the University of London. A member of the Real Academia Española since 2003, he also belongs to the Parisian Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences and is a corresponding member of the Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. His current position is Professor of Science History in the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where he was previously a tenured professor of theoretical physics.
He has authored over 400 publications, including 45 books, among them: El origen y desarrollo de la relatividad (1983); Cincel, martillo y piedra. Historia de la ciencia en España (siglos XIX y XX) (1999); El siglo de la ciencia (2000), for which he won the Premio José Ortega y Gasset de Ensayo y Humanidades from the City of Madrid; El poder de la ciencia: historia social, política y económica de la ciencia (siglos XIX y XX) (2007); Ciencia, política y poder. Napoleón, Hitler, Stalin y Eisenhower, published by Fundación BBVA (2010); and El mundo después de la revolución: la física de la segunda mitad del siglo XX (2014), which recently earned him the 2015 National Essay Prize.
José Manuel Sánchez Ron’s lecture is the latest expression of the BBVA Foundation’s longstanding engagement with the promotion of science and the dissemination of knowledge. In the Basic Sciences area, it has organized lecture series like the one devoted to The Science of the Cosmos, which in four editions has welcomed some of the world’s top experts in astrophysics and cosmology, or the particle physics lecture series co-organized with CERN, featuring speakers like the incoming CERN Director General, Fabiola Gianotti.
For more information, contact the BBVA Foundation Department of Communication and Institutional Relations ( +34 91 374 5210; 91 537 3769; 91 374 8173/)
or visit www.fbbva.es