ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF YOUTH The actuality of General Relativity , from cosmology to GPS

Thursday, December 3, 2015
General Relativity is 100 years old and does not look it . December 2, 2015 : Lecture by Prof. Maurizio Busso

It tries to reconstruct briefly the unique character and the intact freshness of what, after a hundred years and she looks great, is among the most revolutionary theories of physics. A theory that challenges the geometry of Euclid and the principle of inertia of Galileo, showing how gravity can bend the fabric of space-time and how each observer, in any motion in the universe, is considered equivalent to all the others. Then continues by revealing the strange world in which even the light is bent by gravity and nevertheless continues to make the shortest path between two points; and he takes issue with the ideas of Kepler on planetary motion and Newton with those of the action at a distance. That, finally, that allows us to see distant galaxies even when they are hidden (and because they are hidden) by huge concentrations of dark matter; which it describes as huge masses may disappear into a black hole of negligible size; and as the whole universe in its evolution is governed by a form still unknown part of energy that accelerates and was introduced by Einstein himself. After a century, the rebellious nature of General Relativity still does not allow us to deal with gravity in a manner consistent with the other forces of nature; and yet this theory there is so well known that each of you will probably keep the secrets in his pocket, encoded in GPS smartphone.