Albert Einstein Discovers How Strange the Universe Really Is

It's hard to know exactly what to say about Albert Einstein in a short description like this. From the basic Astronomy perspective, Einstein only marginally impacted the model of what we average humans see in the night sky. His theories of "Relativity" (both "Special" and "General") gave a whole new perspective on the gravitational forces Isaac Newton used to explain the motions of the planets. Instead of a mysterious attraction, Einstein said that the presence of matter actually warps the local space, so an object moving through space near a massive object like a star would simply follow what, to it, seemed like a straight path - creating the illusion of a force acting to change its direction.

For most objects we can see in our solar system, this new explanation doesn't affect what we observe, only why we observe it. The exception is Mercury. Mercury's orbit does not precisely follow the course predicted by Newton's law of gravity. Because it is so close to the sun, the predictions of Einstein's Relativity and Newton's mechanics diverge a bit, with Relativity giving the more accurate course.

For objects farther afield, like stars and other galaxies, Relativity and Einstein's many other discoveries impact what we see in the night sky with our best telescopes. They say that light energy is carried by psuedo-particles called photons, and that the path of these photons will be bent by very massive objects. So stars may not be where they appear to be in the night sky.

Many of Einstein's discoveries required enormous leaps of intuition to even imagine, so far as they were from the science of the day. And in the early years of the 20th Century, he seemed to produce a new brilliant theory every few months. Some of these, including Relativity, were actually being mulled and considered by other scientists, but Einstein understood and described them much more clearly and completely. 

In a very real sense, Einstein's theories mark a departure in science from all that came before. With a good primary and high school education, most of us can understand Newton's laws of motion, and even the mathematics of The Calculus. But beyond the fundamental idea of Relativity ("Massive objects bend the fabric of space-time.") very few of us can really grasp the ideas, much less the mathematics of Einstein's world. And that was just the beginning.

Fast on the heels of Relativity came quantum mechanics and all of the bizarre, counter-intuitive - even irrational seeming - predictions of that set of theories. But endless experimental evidence - and more recently, real-world products - confirm the truth of this seeming unreal model of our reality. For example, modern hard drives and solid state storage devices rely on quantum affects. Einstein could not accept it. I could barely grasp it's basic ideas when confronted with it in my undergraduate years, and only passed the course because nobody else really got it either.

From there, matters have only gotten worse. All of the strange predictions of Relativity have been actually observed as we develop better experiments and technology. Black holes , for example. Observational evidence has lead to String Theory (which cannot be tested experimentally), Dark matter , Dark energy and other theories that seem to explain strange observations, but whose nature, reason for existance, or even any direct observation still eludes human science.