In 1915, Albert Einstein concluded his General Theory of Relativity, a theory that would revise our understanding of gravity in radical ways. Before Einstein, the dominant description of gravitational phenomena was based on Isaac Newton's theory, proposed in 1687. According to Newton, every two objects with mass attract one another with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distance: double the distance, the attraction falls by a factor of four. Newton knew that his theory had a fundamental flaw, a mysterious "action at a distance." Somehow, and he wouldn't speculate how, the force of gravity propagated instantaneously across space like a sort of omnipresent ghost. Despite this, the theory was so successful at describing so many phenomena that Newton rested his case: "I feign no hypotheses," he famously wrote. Einstein would have none of that. In 1905, in his Special Theory of Relativity, he established tha
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