Quotes About General Relativity

#1. General relativity then establishes that objects move toward regions where time elapses more slowly; in a sense, all objects "want" to age as slowly as possible. From an Einsteinian perspective, that explains why an object falls when you let go of it.

Brian Greene

#2. General relativity predicts that time ends inside black holes because the gravitational collapse squeezes matter to infinite density.

Lee Smolin

#3. Many of us have no grasp of quantum theory, or Einstein's theories of special and general relativity, but this does not in itself lead us to oppose these theories! Darwinism, unlike 'Einsteinism', seems to be regarded as fair game for critics with any degree of ignorance.

Richard Dawkins

#4. The math of quantum mechanics and the math of general relativity, when they confront one another, they are ferocious antagonists and the equations don't work.

Brian Greene

#5. Asked in 1919 whether it was true that only three people in the world understood the theory of general relativity, [Eddington] allegedly replied: 'Who's the third?

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#6. Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are both accepted as scientific fact even though they're mutually exclusive. Albert Einstein spent the second half of his life searching for a unifying truth that would reconcile the two.

Roy H. Williams

#7. An extrapolation of its present rate of growth reveals that in the not too distant future Physical Review will fill bookshelves at a speed exceeding that of light. This is not forbidden by general relativity since no information is being conveyed.

David Mermin

#8. We have to have a combination of general relativity that describes the warping of space and time, and quantum physics, which describes the uncertainties in that warping and how they change.

Kip Thorne

#9. Most of what Einstein said and did has no direct impact on what anybody reads in the Bible. Special relativity, his work in quantum mechanics, nobody even knows or cares. Where Einstein really affects the Bible is the fact that general relativity is the organizing principle for the Big Bang.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#10. GPS timing is incredibly precise; of all the problems in engineering, it's one of the only ones in which engineers have been forced to include both special and general relativity in their calculations.

Randall Munroe

#11. What you can show using physics, forces this universe to continue to exist. As long as you're using general relativity and quantum mechanics you are forced to conclude that God exists.

Frank Tipler

#12. General relativity is the cornerstone of cosmology and astrophysics. It has also provided the conceptual basis for string theory and other attempts to unify all the forces of nature in terms of geometrical structures.

Paul Davies

#13. [John Wheeler] rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians

Freeman Dyson

#14. (According to some accounts, a journalist told Eddington in the early 1920s that he had heard there were only three people in the world who understood general relativity. Eddington paused, then replied, "I am trying to think who the third person is.")

Stephen Hawking

#15. Gravitational waves will bring us exquisitely accurate maps of black holes - maps of their space-time. Those maps will make it crystal clear whether or not what we're dealing with are black holes as described by general relativity.

Kip Thorne

#16. When general relativity was first put forward in 1915, the math was very unfamiliar to most physicists. Now we teach general relativity to advanced high school students.

Brian Greene

#17. No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you're going to fail.

Brian Greene

#18. Combining quantum entanglement with wormholes yields mind boggling results about black holes. But I don't trust them until we have a theory of everything which can combine quantum effects with general relativity. i.e. we need to have a full blown string theory resolve this sticky question.

Michio Kaku

#19. I always found it satisfying that gravity was described by Einstein's geometric theory of general relativity.

Antony Garrett Lisi

#20. general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot both be right,

Brad S. Gregory

#21. So what I'm saying is why don't we think about changing Schrodinger's equation at some level when masses become too big at the level that you might have to worry about Einstein's general relativity.

Roger Penrose

#22. The star S0-2 orbits around Sgr A* every 16 years and will go through its closest approach in 2018. That's an opportunity to test Einstein's General Relativity theory through very precise measurements of this star's short period orbit.

Andrea M. Ghez

#23. A university student attending lectures on general relativity i the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for thinking that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century.

Carlo Rovelli

#24. The Great Pyramid of Giza was designed in agreement with the Theory of General Relativity.

Ibrahim Ibrahim

#25. Another prediction of general relativity is that time should appear to run slower near a massive body like the earth.

Stephen Hawking

#26. In the context of general relativity, space almost is a substance. It can bend and twist and stretch, and probably the best way to think about space is to just kind of imagine a big piece of rubber that you can pull and twist and bend.

Alan Guth

#27. An event horizon is also called the point of no return. In a sense of general relativity, it's the point at which the gravitational pull becomes so great escape is impossible. Some theorize quantum gravity effects become significant in the vicinity of such an occurrence.

Karen Marie Moning

#28. I thought of Einstein, and his insistence that no particular point of view was more privileged than any other: in other words his 'general relativity', and its claim that the answer to the question 'What is real?" begins with the question 'Where are you standing?

Robert Charles Wilson

#29. Einstein's theory of General Relativity has a mathematical structure very similar to Yang-Mills theory.

Chen-Ning Yang

#30. I became interested in this question of whether you can build wormholes for interstellar travel. I realized that if you had a wormhole, the theory of general relativity by itself would permit you to go backward in time.

Kip Thorne

#31. Does general relativity predict that our universe should have had a big bang, a beginning of time?

Stephen Hawking

#32. You can invoke neither time nor space nor matter not energy nor the laws of nature to explain the origin of the universe. General relativity points to the need for a cause that transcends those domains. ~Stephen C. Meyer, PHD~

Lee Strobel

#33. Einstein, my upset stomach hates your theory [of General Relativity] - it almost hates you yourself! How am I to' provide for my students? What am I to answer to the philosophers?!!

Paul Ehrenfest

#34. The notion of Local Inertial Frame is crucial to understanding Nature and, in particular, General Relativity. Notwithstanding, very few popular science books (not even textbooks) emphasize enough its fundamental character.

Felix Alba-Juez

#35. Einstein was searching for String Theory. It not only reconciles General Relativity to Quantum Mechanics, but it reconciles Science and the Bible as well.

Roy H. Williams

#36. The real reason why general relativity is widely accepted is because it made predictions that were borne out by experimental observations.

Brian Greene

#37. Reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.

Joe Haldeman

#38. In Einstein's general relativity the structure of space can change but not its topology. Topology is the property of something that doesn't change when you bend it or stretch it as long as you don't break anything.

Edward Witten

#39. One looks forward to the day when the General Theory of Relativity and the Principia will outsell the Kama Sutra in back-street bookshops.

J.G. Ballard

#40. A mathematician tells you that the wall of warped space prevents the Moon from flying out of its orbit yet can't tell you why an astronaut can go back and forth across that same space.

Bill Gaede

#41. A mathematician says that an electromagnetic wave travels from Andromeda to your eye and that it also extends from Andromeda to your eye.

Bill Gaede

#42. For years, my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science. It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein's general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin.

Stephen Hawking

#43. Back in 1917, when Einstein had analyzed the "cosmological considerations" arising from his general theory of relativity, most astronomers thought that the universe consisted only of our Milky Way, floating with its 100 billion or so stars in a void of empty space.

Walter Isaacson

#44. His new idea was published that month in what became yet another seminal Einstein paper, "Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity."9 On the surface, it did indeed seem to be based on a crazy notion: space has no borders because gravity bends it back on itself. Einstein

Walter Isaacson

#45. When forced to summarize the general theory of relativity in one sentence: Time and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter.

Albert Einstein

#46. The theory of relativity worked out by Mr. Einstein, which is in the domain of natural science, I believe can also be applied to the political field. Both democracy and human rights are relative concepts - and not absolute and general.

Jiang Zemin

#47. The total number of people who understand relativistic time, even after eighty years since the advent of special relativity, is still much smaller than the number of people who believe in horoscopes.

Yuval Ne'eman

#48. If, relative to K, K' is a uniformly moving co-ordinate system devoid of rotation, then natural phenomena run their course with respect to K' according to exactly the same general laws as with respect to K. This statement is called the Principle of Relativity (in the restricted sense).

Albert Einstein

#49. It is almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity.

Michael Moorcock

#50. General theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. They are the great intellectual achievements of the first half of this century.

Stephen Hawking

#51. It is the definition of the word 'object' which destroys all religions.

Bill Gaede

#52. In my personal experience I have hardly come to know the wretchedness of mankind better than as a result of the general theory of relativity and everything connected to it. But it doesn't bother me.

Albert Einstein

#53. It is ironic that Einsteins most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [..] ...

Robert B. Laughlin

#54. Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.

Stephen Hawking

#55. A mathematician makes plans to travel backwards in time through a wormhole to a parallel universe when he can't even make it to Mars with the fastest rocket on hand today.

Bill Gaede