WHEN physicist Stephen Hawking starting writing his bestseller A Brief History of Time, he was warned that including just a single equation would halve the sales of his book. Despite the financial implications, Hawking felt compelled to include one, E = mc2, underlining the iconic status of Albert Einstein's famous formulation.
The equation, published exactly 100 years ago this week, has come to symbolise the upheavals of early 20th-century physics. Einstein's theories of relativity, along with quantum physics, changed our ideas of space and time, cause and effect, and spawned theories for everything from the big bang to black holes. For decades, relativity and quantum mechanics have provided the foundation for modern physics.
Now this foundation is cracking. Enigmatic discoveries of dark matter a few decades ago and of dark energy a few years ago have thrown physics into turmoil. Nearly 96 per cent of the universe is made of ...
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