Andrea M. Ghez Quotes

Einstein's gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational phenomena with the geometry of space; this was an exciting idea.

It is theoretically possible to warp spacetime itself, so you're not actually moving faster than the speed of light, but it's actually space that's moving.

Pulsars are in an ideal part of the universe to test Einstein's theory of relativity - so far, it's holding up well. They may even one day act as navigational beacons for spacecraft. I'll never tire of them; they really are the most extraordinary objects.

The key to proving that there's a black hole is showing that there's a tremendous amount of mass in a very small volume. And you can do that with the motions of stars.

Einstein got most of the things right about black holes. I'm not an expert, I must admit.

So what I'm saying is why don't we think about changing Schrodinger's equation at some level when masses become too big at the level that you might have to worry about Einstein's general relativity.

The key to proving that there's a black hole is showing that there's a tremendous amount of mass in a very small volume. And you can do that with the motions of stars. The way the star moves around the center of the galaxy is very much like the way the planets orbit the sun.

Before 1915, space and time were thought of as a fixed arena in which events took place, but which was not affected by what happened in it. Space and time are now dynamic quantities... space and time not only affect but are also affected by everything that happens in the universe.

And it really began with Einstein. We attended his lectures. Now the theory of relativity remained - and still remains - only a theory. It has not been proven. But it suggested a completely different picture of the physical world.

General relativity predicts that time ends inside black holes because the gravitational collapse squeezes matter to infinite density.

Most of what Einstein said and did has no direct impact on what anybody reads in the Bible. Special relativity, his work in quantum mechanics, nobody even knows or cares. Where Einstein really affects the Bible is the fact that general relativity is the organizing principle for the Big Bang.

I became interested in this question of whether you can build wormholes for interstellar travel. I realized that if you had a wormhole, the theory of general relativity by itself would permit you to go backward in time.

When you fall into a black hole, everything that falls in after you over millions of years, as seen by you inside the black hole, comes pounding down on you in a fraction of a second, because of the enormous differences of time flow.

The whole idea of gravity curling up space, that is the epitome of what is going on in a black hole. I would've loved to have seen Einstein's face if he were presented with the data that we actually discovered such a thing, because he himself probably didn't believe in much of it.

Einstein had two new predictions from general relativity. One was that light would bend. That was tested in 1919, and basically, he was proven right. The second prediction was gravitational waves, which took us 100 years to prove. The theory itself, which is thought by most to be rather obscure, you use every day, probably.

Experimentally, we now have demonstrated that Einstein's theory is right in strong gravitational fields. That's important to a lot of people.

When general relativity was first put forward in 1915, the math was very unfamiliar to most physicists. Now we teach general relativity to advanced high school students.

Relativity challenges your basic intuitions that you've built up from everyday experience. It says your experience of time is not what you think it is, that time is malleable. Your experience of space is not what you think it is; it can stretch and shrink.

Fortunately, most things around the supermassive black hole are just going to go around it. They're going to orbit it. They don't actually get sucked in.

I always found it satisfying that gravity was described by Einstein's geometric theory of general relativity.

A big misconception is that a black hole is made of matter that has just been compacted to a very small size. That's not true. A black hole is made from warped space and time.

Einstein, in the special theory of relativity, proved that different observers, in different states of motion, see different realities.

Black holes are very exotic objects. Technically, a black hole puts a huge amount of mass inside of zero volume. So our understanding of the center of black holes doesn't make sense, which is a big clue to physicists that we don't have our physics quite right.

Although almost every theoretical physicist agrees with my prediction that a black hole should glow like a hot body, it would be very difficult to verify experimentally because the temperature of a macroscopic black hole is so low.

The real reason why general relativity is widely accepted is because it made predictions that were borne out by experimental observations.