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Arguably, "Einstein's" greatest scientific
legacy is his general theory of relativity
and his elegant theory free of gravity.
What he wound up showing
was that space and time,
the fabric of gravitation can ripple,
it can actually have waves of gravity.
Even though "Einstein" had
predicted gravitational waves,
he never thought they'd be detectable.
That was an idea that "Einstein" put
forward 100 years ago, and it's taken us
all that time to build devices sensitive
enough to actually look for and
really measure those gravitational waves.
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- I certainly didn't think we could
detect gravitational waves, but
today with the technology that we have,
we actually did it.
On September 2015 finally,
we detected gravitational waves.
We measured the distortion
of space time itself.
This is the LIGO laboratory at MIT.
LIGO is the Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-Wave Observatory.
It was funded by National Science
Foundation to detect gravitational waves,
predicted by "Einstein's"
theory of general relativity.
It took more than 20 years and
about 100 scientists and
engineers all over the world
to make LIGO work.
The gravitational wave discoveries
won't impact your life or my life but
we did is amazing.
Gravitational waves open
a new window on the universe.
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- "Einstein" also thought a lot
about how matter behaves at its most
fundamental level.
He predicted a whole new state of matter.
When we take a gas of particles and
cool it down to almost absolute zero,
some very strange quantum
behaviors start to emerge.
At those ultra low
temperatures the individual
particles will lose their identities and
they begin to act as one.
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- In this lab, we're using lithium atoms
to create Bose-Einstein condensates.
"Einstein" predicted the state of
matter almost 80 years ago, but
only recently we have been able
to produce it in a lab like this.
And "Einstein" would never have
dreamed about all the technology that
needed to come together to build it.
Now, we're making VCs on a daily basis
right here in this vacuum chamber.
Our next level research is actually
building the materials of the future.
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- As we now know, "Einstein" was wrong
at least as often as he was right.
In the course of testing quantum
entanglement, ultimately showing in this
case "Einstein" was wrong, physicists have
not only found entanglement is real, but
it's now the bedrock for
a whole new set of technologies.
Industries like quantum computing
that could one day make small
machines like this seem
like enormous monsters.
- So "Einstein" was famously
wrong about quantum mechanics.
This device here is a quantum computer,
it contains a computer the size of
a molecule that can do computations that
no classical computer could ever perform,
even if it were a computer
the size of the universe.
And the basis for this is in "Einstein's"
spooky action at a distance,
this is what we call entanglement.
Now "Einstein" thought that the existence
of spooky action at a distance,
would just kill off quantum mechanics.
Instead it became the basis for
some of the most amazing things that
quantum mechanics has to offer, including
the basis for quantum computation.
- So, was "Einstein" right or wrong?
Scientists have spent 100 years
trying to test these questions,
debating the results, inventing whole new
technologies to try to dig deeper and
go further.
And every single time we've
learned something new.
That, is worth celebrating.
(Music)
- The prediction of gravitational waves
was made by "Einstein" 100 years ago.
In that paper he says, this is such a tiny
effect that nobody will ever measure it.
Well I always was experimenting and
I did a lot of calculations on it.
And I also guessed at what might by
the strongest gravitational waves we
could imagine.
And I came to the conclusion after that,
that yes,
if you built this on a scale big enough,
