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6 MARCH 2015 • VOL 347 ISSUE 6226 1083

Sitting at a desk or toiling alone in a labora-

tory for years, until—eureka!—insight

dawns. That’s the myth of how science is

done. And it’s almost always wrong. In

reality, scientific progress comes incremen-

tally, most researchers work in teams, and

lone geniuses do not hand the world

revolutionary new theories.

But Albert Einstein did.

This 2 December will mark the 100th anniversary

of the publication—in four short pages—of Einstein’s

general theory of relativity, to this day physicists’

fundamental theory of gravity. Governing the

universe on the largest scales, general relativity

stands with quantum mechanics, which reigns on

the smallest scales, as a foundation stone of modern

physics. But whereas quantum theory was the

achievement of many—de Broglie, Bohr, Heisenberg,

Schrödinger, Born, Dirac—general relativity leapt

fully formed from Einstein’s mind.

In concocting the theory, Einstein relied on

thought experiments—as he had in developing the

special theory of relativity, published in 1905, which

showed that space and time are fungible aspects of a

single spacetime. In inventing special relativity,

Einstein imagined surfing a light wave; for general

relativity, he envisioned walking off a roof. Through

such musings Einstein realized that gravity is merely

the bending of spacetime by mass and energy.

A century later, that insight underpins cutting-

edge physics: searching for gravitational waves,

probing the extreme gravity near the supermassive

black hole at the center of our galaxy, tracing the

origin of the universe. This special issue celebrates

the singular achievement that made it all possible.

EINSTEIN’SVISIONGENERAL RELATIVITY TURNS 100

Adrian Cho and Daniel Clery also edited this special issue.PH

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S P E C I A L S E C T I O N

Shapes of distant galaxies in

this image from the Hubble Space

Telescope are warped by the

mass of a galaxy cluster closer to

Earth—a distortion predicted by

general relativity.

By Margaret Moerchen and Robert Coontz

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Einstein's visionMargaret Moerchen and Robert Coontz

DOI: 10.1126/science.347.6226.1082 (6226), 1082-1083.347Science 

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