What Einstein did in 1905 his first theory of relativity that would be enough for most
people.
But he had another idea, a more powerful idea which came together in 1915 when he was in
his mid-30s the middle of World War I and it's called General Relativity.
And it's a magnificent idea, if he hadn't come up with it I doubt if anybody else would
have in the more than century since then.
And it's a notion of explaining how all of space and time and all of matter and everything
is organized and what's amazing is instead of being a long complicated thing he got it
down to two little symbols and this was extraordinary.
He thought who had created a universe where all the complexity we see, the spinning of
the earth around the sun, how the galaxy moves, if it moves at all, that all this could be
explained in terms of two simple symbols.
And he thought this was fabulous and then he looked at his symbols and he realized they
predicted that the universe was expanding.
He asked his astronomer friends in 1917/1918 is the universe in fact expanding?
And they said no its static.
They thought at that time the universe was just the Milky Way Galaxy a whole bunch of
stars floating there in space and beyond there there was just an empty void.
It was sort of like Donald Trump's brain there was just angry magnetic fields full of nothing.
And Einstein thought are you sure?
And they said well that's kind of what the universe is like.
So he had to change that beautiful simple equation and had to put in an extra term,
which is symbolized by the lambda.
And instead of thinking God or the old one or whatever force there is behind the universe
had made something very simple for us to discover, there's this ugly equation, this additional
term that sort of canceled the expansion.
Anyways, about ten years later in 1929 Edwin Hubble in California and other people said
oy were we wrong.
They probably didn't say the word oy, were we wrong they said.
The universe is expanding after all.
And Einstein thought the good news is I get to take away the lambda, that extra term.
I can go back to that beautiful simple clear thing I discovered back in 1915 in general
relativity.
And that's okay.
That's an allowable mistake.
I don't think that's his greatest mistake.
The great mistake came after that.
He drew a psychological conclusion.
He concluded that he was wrong to have listened to experimental evidence because he believed
that the universe and should be crisp and clear an exact, from now on if he had those
beliefs and experimental evidence came up that contradicted it he could ignore it.
Remember, he would have been right, he would have been right to ignore all the evidence
that the astronomers thought about the shape of the universe.
They were wrong for ten years.
Well, it turns out in the late 1920s when Einstein had this breakthrough or this idea
that's when quantum mechanics was coming in, this idea of the ultra small, electrons, things
like that.
And they seemed to move around not in the clear beautiful ways that Einstein wanted
but there was randomness and chance and probability and Einstein thought okay that's the limits
of our technical abilities, our observations only see this fuzziness but if we have better
tools we'll be able to see things more exactly.
Einstein thought that things like uncertainty were just a temporary stage in mankind's development,
but the physicist said no the evidence is really clear.
And Einstein said I was burnt once before with that lambda and the expansion of the
universe, I'm not going to be burned again.
So he dug in, he doubled up and as time went on the evidence for quantum mechanics, for
this randomness and probability on the ultra small that evidence became stronger and stronger,
but Einstein was stuck.
He couldn't let it go.
He just thought if I had held at my confidence for ten years before I would have been okay.
Well, maybe it might be 20 years, maybe it might be beyond my lifetime but I'm sure Einstein
thought I'm sure that the universe can't be disordered.
That's why he said, "God does not play dice with the universe," and his good friend Niels
Bohr said, " Einstein, stop telling God what to do."