No. He won the Nobel prize for a paper on the photoelectric effect. It was one of three brilliant papers he published in 1905, the other two introduced special relativity and predicted Brownian motion.

<Give us 200 more years and I'm sure Einstein's theories will begin to fall apart one by one>

General relativity is just a model. It just says that spacetime is a 4-dimensional manifold, and that gravity is a manifestation of the choice of metric. Perhaps in 200 years some kind of quantum gravity theory will be standard.

Yes, Einstein is overrated, end of of story. But concerning the comments you made about some of Newtons theories being false and not holding up under certain circumstances, I have but one thing to say about that. Did you ever stop to think that some of Newton's theories have gone up against over 300 years or scrutiny, whereas Einstein's ideas were only hatched in the last century? Give us 200 more years and I'm sure Einstein's theories will begin to fall apart one by one.>

You are wrong. And, frankly, if this were not the chessgames.com site, where I must maintain decorum, I would have said quite plainly that you are...um...not very smart.

Anyway, I don't want to spend my time discussing a topic about which my interlocutor knows NOTHING.

*****

A few people asked about the Twins Paradox.

The answer is that Grounder, who remained on the earth, is indeed older than Spacely, who has been travelling at great speeds.

The "paradox"--or what is seemingly paradoxical--is that from the point of view of Spacely, it is Grounder who has been travelling very fast. However, the situation here is not perfectly symmetrical, because only one of the frames of reference--Grounder's frame--is what is called an "inertial frame." Spacely's frame of reference is a non-inertial frame. Only Spacely experiences an acceleration; Grounder does not. (This can easily be measured by experiments involving spectral shifts, even simpler ones are possible.)

As a result, the physics that Spacely observes cannot be measured by our inertial laws and theories.

The "Answer" to the Twins Paradox, is that the "travelling" twin actually changes his inertial reference frame by going in both directions.

General relativity's most fundamental idea is that there is an equivalence between an acceleration and a gravitational field. In other words, if you're in an accelerating spaceship (without any extermal reference cues) you have no way to distinguish the "weight" you feel from the accelleration of the ship from a gravitation field from, say, a planet. (n.b. This only applies to a given point. Take two measurements, one "above" the other, and the gravity field will show a slight difference- a "tide"- whereas the accelerating intertial reference frame will not.)

The travelling twin must, in order to get back to his starting point, go through a large change in acceleration. Because of the equivilance between gravity and accelerating, this changes the rate at which clocks in the rest of the universe appear to tick. (Gravity changes the speed at which clocks tick.) The stay-at-home twin, during the change in direction of the travelling twin, will appear to be at the top of a very deep gravitational potential, and thus the stay-at-home twin's clocks will appear to run faster during the change in direction. This contributes to the Twin "paradox."

All this has been tested with atomic clocks and airplanes and has been demonstrated to happen exactly as Einstein predicted.

In one way of looking at it, yes. However, my explanation was a bit lazy- the general relativistic way of looking at the Twin Pardox is by far the easiest to get the brain around. The explanation incorporating only special relativity requires pictures to visualize adequately, and is much harder.

Okay, you asked for it... :-)

String theory is a yet another method of attempting to combine the the theory of Relativity with the various models of quantum behavior. It is more properly thought of as part of a much larger complex of 5 different models of looking at the universe called "M-Brane" theory or, simply "M" theory.

The theory (or more properly "theories") is far too complicated to explain in a single post. (I've been struggling for years to understand it.) However, part of it can be summarized quite easily.

If one models the behavior of the various particles in the universe as tiny, one dimensional "strings", that vibrate according to some fairly simple formulae, one can build up a model of the universe based on these vibrations that matches the behavior of particles that we see in the world. M-Brane theory also applies a number of "rules" to these particles that govern how they behave with each other and with other, larger, two-or-more dimensional structures called "branes".

For instance, in one conception of M theory, looped strings float freely between branes, but non-looped strings attach themselves to branes. So, a non-looped string is confined to the "surface" of a brane, whereas the looped string could travel between them.

So, for instance, if we imagine the three familliar dimensions of our universe to be a "brane" and we imagine that, for instance, a photon (light particle) is a non-loop and a graviton (hypothetical gravity particle) is a loop, then we would imagine that gravitons and photons would behave differently. A photon, emitted on our 3-dimensional brane, would forever be trapped in that brane. In other words, a photon would never "go missing". However, in this model, a graviton, which can float freely between branes, might tend to wander off of our brane and have an influence in other, paralell branes (that is, other parallel universes.) In this conception, it is possible to imagine that there might be "missing" gravity or, if there are many other branes out there parallel to ours, additional gravity seeping in from these other universes that we cannot see with photons.

This particular model offers up a nice explanation for the unsolved problem in cosmology of "dark matter"- the problem by which the masses of galaxy clusters and other large structures in the universe, seem to have much more gravity than the matter in them (matter that we can see by looking at the various forms of electromagnetic radiation that they emit) would suggest.

But this is just a tiny part of "M" theory.

"M Theory" is a work in progress. That is, there are various competing flavors of it out there being discussed and debated. Several of the competing variants -- different variants are usually distinguished by the number of dimensions they suggest -- make predictions that can, in principle, be tested. It will probably fall to the results of a set of experiments to decide which, if any, "M Theory" is correct.

This synopsis is pretty good: