(Music)
Arguably, "Einstein's" greatest scientific legacy is his general theory of relativity
and his elegant theory free of gravity.
What he wound up showing was that space and time,
the fabric of gravitation can ripple, it can actually have waves of gravity.
Even though "Einstein" had predicted gravitational waves,
he never thought they'd be detectable.
That was an idea that "Einstein" put forward 100 years ago, and it's taken us
all that time to build devices sensitive enough to actually look for and
really measure those gravitational waves.
(Music)
- I certainly didn't think we could detect gravitational waves, but
today with the technology that we have, we actually did it.
On September 2015 finally, we detected gravitational waves.
We measured the distortion of space time itself.
This is the LIGO laboratory at MIT.
LIGO is the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.
It was funded by National Science Foundation to detect gravitational waves,
predicted by "Einstein's" theory of general relativity.
It took more than 20 years and about 100 scientists and
engineers all over the world to make LIGO work.
The gravitational wave discoveries won't impact your life or my life but
we did is amazing.
Gravitational waves open a new window on the universe.
(Music)
- "Einstein" also thought a lot about how matter behaves at its most
fundamental level.
He predicted a whole new state of matter.
When we take a gas of particles and cool it down to almost absolute zero,
some very strange quantum behaviors start to emerge.
At those ultra low temperatures the individual
particles will lose their identities and they begin to act as one.
(Music)
- In this lab, we're using lithium atoms to create Bose-Einstein condensates.
"Einstein" predicted the state of matter almost 80 years ago, but
only recently we have been able to produce it in a lab like this.
And "Einstein" would never have dreamed about all the technology that
needed to come together to build it.
Now, we're making VCs on a daily basis right here in this vacuum chamber.
Our next level research is actually building the materials of the future.
(Music)
- As we now know, "Einstein" was wrong at least as often as he was right.
In the course of testing quantum entanglement, ultimately showing in this
case "Einstein" was wrong, physicists have not only found entanglement is real, but
it's now the bedrock for a whole new set of technologies.
Industries like quantum computing that could one day make small
machines like this seem like enormous monsters.
- So "Einstein" was famously wrong about quantum mechanics.
This device here is a quantum computer, it contains a computer the size of
a molecule that can do computations that no classical computer could ever perform,
even if it were a computer the size of the universe.
And the basis for this is in "Einstein's" spooky action at a distance,
this is what we call entanglement.
Now "Einstein" thought that the existence of spooky action at a distance,
would just kill off quantum mechanics.
Instead it became the basis for some of the most amazing things that
quantum mechanics has to offer, including the basis for quantum computation.
- So, was "Einstein" right or wrong?
Scientists have spent 100 years trying to test these questions,
debating the results, inventing whole new technologies to try to dig deeper and
go further.
And every single time we've learned something new.
That, is worth celebrating.
(Music)
- The prediction of gravitational waves was made by "Einstein" 100 years ago.
In that paper he says, this is such a tiny effect that nobody will ever measure it.
Well I always was experimenting and I did a lot of calculations on it.
And I also guessed at what might by the strongest gravitational waves we
could imagine.
And I came to the conclusion after that, that yes,
if you built this on a scale big enough,