1. Scientific Theories and Laws
2. The First Decade (1936-1946)
4. The Second Decade (1946-1956)
6. The Third Decade (1956-1966)
8. The Fourth Decade (1966-1976)
10. The Fifth Decade (1976-1986)
12. The Sixth Decade (1986-1996)
14. The Seventh Decade (1996-2006)
15. The Theory of More than Everything
16. The Eighth Decade (2006-2016)
18. The Ninth Decade (2016-2026)
Appendix A Paintings
Appendix B TTOMTE and a Steady State Universe
Appendix C Musical Compositions
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After giving the world the Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein puzzled over accelerated motion for ten years. Uniform motion was relative, but he really wanted to believe accelerated motion was too. Just for the coffee question alone, he constructed ten equations so complicated even he couldn't solve them.
According to a popular story, Newton developed his theory of gravity thinking about a falling apple. He assumed space, time, and distance were absolutes, and those assumptions worked fine for a couple of hundred years. However, Einstein put all the puzzles about accelerated motion into that spinning bucket, shook it up, turned it over, and spilled the General Theory of Relativity all over Newton's nice classical carpet. Einstein spent ten years of intensive work before he had his stroke of genius. (With ten years of work like that, most of us would've just had a stroke.) Let's see what he did with the three puzzles from above:
1) Where does the drag come from when we try to speed up?
2) Why do inertia (the apple) and gravity (the force) always balance out perfectly?
3) Is spinning coffee in absolute motion?
Here are the answers, but out of order:
2) Einstein solved them all by answering the second question. Why do inertia and gravity always balance out perfectly? He said it's because they are the same thing. Huh? How can that be? Gravity is a force created by a heavy object pulling other things to it while inertia is something in a heavy object which says, "Don't move." To explain this strange relationship, we'll borrow from Einstein's famous thought experiment in another (guess what) elevator.
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