Whimsical wavelengths is here again to show that it is useless to fight gravity.
Every time I have, it has brought me down.
To begin I'll mention Newtonian mechanics of gravity here in the show notes as it works really well for nearly all things within our solar system. But there are things that does not fit. Mercury’s orbit is one famous example. It gave the wrong prediction for the precession of Mercury's closest point to the sun.
Then Einstein developed a theory about space…
And it was about time!
It was a leap forward changing how we viewed the universe and how we would measure it.
It can be argued that this seminal work together with observations from Hubble on Galaxies existing outside of the Milky Way and expanding universe was the beginning of the modern age of cosmology .
Today we are going to get into one topic from relativity directly, gravitational lensing. To be fair to history, the idea that light traveling close to massive objects bends was actually first postulated by Newtonian mechanics of gravity.
And to get out from that enormous weight Dr Georgios Vernardos (Assistant Professor in Physics & Astronomy at Lehman College) has volunteered to come on the podcast. To get from relativity to gravitational lens and to tell the story correctly is hard to do in one episode. So I have planned this one as a pair! So no it is not time dilation due to the weighty subject
Paper at the center the this and the next episode:
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2025/02/aa53014-24/aa53014-24.html
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