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Albert Einstein and Spacetime
Einstein relaxed the conditions of fixed space and time; he considered non-rigid space and stretchy-squishy time in his famous theories of relativity (the theories of Special Relativity and General Relativity). A notion contained in his General Theory was that of the nature of gravity. Newton postulated a Universal Law of Gravitation, but did not understand how gravity worked. Einstein postulated that effects of gravity arose because of the non-rigid nature of space. Mass distorts the structure of space. In a two-dimensional space, situations such as shown below may arise.
A nice test of some of the ideas of Einstein's General Relativity is the prediction and detection of gravitational waves. The canonical example of this is the binary pulsar, PSR 1913+16 for which Jospeh Taylor and Russell Hulse received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1993. A video animation of another close binary, the white dwarf/white dwarf binary RX 0806.3+1527 (Period=321 seconds!) shows binary star evolution with gravity waves.
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