ABSTRACT
Our journey has taken us from the beginning of time to the very edge of the Universe. The legacy left us by Albert Einstein describes a reality far more wonderful and mysterious than anything we could have dreamt up. Time warps, black holes, parallel universes, a past and a future that coexist with the present-none of these are the stuff of science ‚ction. Nor are they the results of the wilder speculations of a nutty minority on the fringes of the scienti‚c establishment. All these exotica are the results of years of slow progress, some of which are now regarded as facts. For instance, the slowing down of time due to gravity is not ‘just a theory which may turn out to be wrong tomorrow when something better comes along’, but is shown to be true on a regular basis in scienti‚c laboratories. Other ideas, while possibilities, may not stand the test of time or the continued close scrutiny of scientists. Sometimes a theory is shown to be just plain wrong if its predictions conžict with the results of an experiment, or it may be replaced with a better theory which explains more phenomena and gives us a deeper understanding of nature.
