"From Einstein's theory of gravity, that is his general relativity theory, we believe mass curves space and this can cause light to follow a curved path, " he told BBC News Online.
Einstein's special relativity theory that says energy equals mass times the speed of light squared underlies "pretty much everything in modern physics, " said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment.
"This means that by watching what happens to the positions of the quasars on the sky as the gravitational field of Jupiter moves past their line-of-sight, the scientists can test other aspects of the general relativity theory, " says Professor Shanks.
In particle physics, sound-bite explanations are much harder: wave-particle duality, quantum mechanics, general relativity and string theory make good mathematical sense, or so I am told, but they generally defy translation into English.
In the past, solar eclipses have helped test such things as Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
This proved a key part of Einstein's theory of relativity for the first time.
Another example is in the special theory of relativity which denies all absolutes and meanings of truth.
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It is notoriously hard to modify the equations of general relativity without damaging the theory beyond repair.
In 1905, Albert Einstein's theory of relativity showed that there is no such thing as absolute time.
Einstein predicted the distortion of light in this way in 1915, as part of his general theory of relativity.
He introduced his famous "Theory of Relativity" during his time in the city.
The author cannot get through a discussion of Einstein's special theory of relativity without a reference to his own precocity.
Some physicists would rather fiddle with Einstein's theory of relativity, for instance by making gravity weaker at extremely long ranges.
Einstein's general theory of relativity states that objects with mass cause a curvature in space-time, which we perceive as gravity.
The SKA will join the hunt for gravitational waves ripples in the structure of space predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.
There was, for example, what might be called the theory of relativity.
After all, Einstein, in his special theory of relativity, had shown that time slows down for objects moving close to the speed of light.
Assuming this principle (without proving it) allowed Einstein to develop the general theory of relativity in 1916, and to describe gravity in purely geometric terms.
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We know that the general theory of relativity is compatible with the existence of space-times in which travel to the past or remote future is possible.
The discovery of quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity, vital to much of modern technology and economic activity, including the transistor, the laser and the atomic bomb.
One example of which the White House is fond is the atomic clock the Pentagon helped Harvard to develop so that scientists could test Einstein's theory of relativity.
Einstein's theory of relativity unified these and created a four-dimensional space that is an analogue to our three-dimensional space, except that the "distance" between two points need not be positive.
It was maybe because of Berne - where clocks continue to tick over centuries - that the Theory of Relativity, a concept that time is not constant, could have been born.
The structure remains the third largest steerable telescope in the world and plays a key role in global research on pulsating stars, testing extreme physics theories including Einstein's general theory of relativity.
In fact, the relativistic offset correction Easton applied to that satellite is still used by every GPS satellite now in orbit, and it also helped to experimentally verify Einstein's theory of relativity for good measure.
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If an object floating through space passes near the line of sight between the earth and a distant star, its gravity should, according to the theory of relativity, bend and focus the light from that star.
Although Riemann, who died at the age of only 39, also laid the foundations in geometry for Einstein's general theory of relativity, his paper on prime sattracted little attention in the decades after it was first published.
One of his great achievements since then, together with mathematician Roger Penrose, has been to prove that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity means space and time has a beginning in the "Big Bang" and ends in black holes.
This exploits one of the predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity: that the path of a beam of light (which is a straight line in empty space) is bent inwards by the gravity of a massive object.
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Instead of using Newton's theory of gravity to examine why fast-moving stars remain within their galaxies, the pair applied general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity, to the problem.
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