EINSTEIN’S ANNUS MIRACULOSUS PART 1

“NEW THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE, NEWTONIAN IDEAS OVERTHROWN” ANNOUNCED THE TIMES of London, November 7, 1919. Yet it could have been even more astonishing: “GRAVITY BENDS LIGHT!”

This thought came to me after reading Ray Monk’s “Einstein’s Miracle Year,” London Review of Books, July 23, 2026. This lengthy article (7861 words) is Monk’s review of three recent books about Albert Einstein: Free Creations of the Human Mind: The Worlds of Albert Einstein, by Diana Kormos-Buchwald and Michael D. Gordin; The Essential Einstein: Scientific Writings, edited by Diana Kormos-Buchwald and Tilman Sauer; and The Essential Einstein: Public Writings, also edited by Kormos-Buchwald and Sauer. 

Kormos-Buchwald is the Robert M. Abbey Professor of History at Caltech. Gordin is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History/Dean of the College at Princeton. Sauer is a professor for the history of science, mathematics, and natural sciences at the University of Mainz. An impressive trio, indeed.

Here are tidbits gleaned from Monk’s LRB review, together with my usual Internet searching. Indeed, (hem hem), the latter includes “Happy 100th—General Relativity! SimanaitisSays, March 27, 2015; and “Two Einstein Anecdotes,” SimanaitisSays, January 12, 2022.

A Gedankenexperimente.  Monk describes, “Imagine that you are in a box in deep space, away from any sun or planet and so not subject to gravity. Now imagine that someone attaches a rope to the top of the box and pulls it ‘upwards’. Your feet would become pressed against the floor. Moreover, if you dropped something, a book say, it would fall to the floor. There would be nothing to tell you whether you were in such a box or on the Earth’s surface. The acceleration through space caused by the pull on the rope and the effect of gravity on Earth would be exactly equivalent.”

For another example (devised during Covid and having nothing to do with our current topic), see “The Chocolate Chip Cookie Gedankenexperiment.”.

Thus Gravity Bends Light. Monk continues, “One notable consequence of the equivalence principle is that gravity bends light. To see this, imagine there is a pinhole in the wall of the box as it accelerates through space, and that a beam of light is shining through it. The light takes some time to reach the far side of the box and will, given the acceleration of the box, hit that side closer to the floor than the hole through which it entered. If you traced the path of the light, it would curve downwards. But light, by definition, travels in a straight line. So, Einstein concluded, in a gravitational field, a straight line must follow a curved path.” 

Tomorrow in Part 2, we find reason to abandon Euclidian geometry. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2026