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Article: Relativity, General Theory of
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- Encyclopedia of Science and Religion
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Relativity, General Theory of
Albert Einstein radically reshaped the understanding of gravity through his proposal of the General Theory of Relativity in 1916. The problem he tackled was to create a theory of gravity that was consistent with his Special Relativity Theory, including its radical transformation of the understanding of space and time measurements through the introduction of a unified concept of space-time. Special relativity is based on the invariance of the laws of physics under any constant change of velocity, and hence the equivalence from a physical viewpoint of all uniformly moving (non-accelerating) observers. General relativity extended these ideas to a special ...