The scientific community had been splintered, and Einstein was trapped behind the curtain of war. Lines of communications between countries were severed, and there was little time for discussion of space-gravity and cosmology. World War I had cast Europe into an economic and academic winter.

He left the task of proving his theory correct to other scientists, and that opportunity would arrive three years later. When Einstein submitted his work on general relativity for publication, he warned publishers that “there were not more than twelve persons in the whole world who would understand it,” The New York Times reported in 1919. He suggested that the values at which light deflected would be much higher than others, including Newton, anticipated. Instead, he proposed that this phenomenon occurred not because of a specific force but because of curvature in space-much like how placing a heavy weight in the center of a mattress causes it to sag, pulling any object rolled across it toward the center. A century later, German mathematician Johann Georg von Soldner published the first calculations quantifying Newton’s work in 1804.īut Einstein took Newton's original claims a step further. Sir Isaac Newton had made similar claims in his 1704 treatise, Optiks, but he wasn’t able to quantitatively prove this phenomenon. In 1916, Einstein had published the mathematical details for his general theory of relativity, in which he proposed that light and time could be bent or deflected by the gravitational field of massive objects in the universe, like the sun. If not for the effort of a small group of British scientists, who recognized Einstein's genius and determined to push past war and stigma, we may never have learned of humanity's most important achievement.īut on November 6, 1919, British scientist Arthur Stanley Eddington would change the course of Einstein's life forever. Albert Einstein, the wire-haired physicist, whose worked reshaped our understanding of the universe, is a household name-but that wasn't always the case.īefore 1919, only a handful of scientists knew of Einstein's pivotal work, and fewer still supported it.

Einstein published theory of relativity