Without the notion of fields introduced by Faraday, without the spectacular power of mathematics, without the geometry of Gauss and Riemann, this ‘certain physics’ would have remained incomprehensible. Empowered by new conceptual tools and by mathematics, Einstein writes the equations which describe Democritus’s void and finds for its ‘certain physics’ a colourful and amazing world where universes explode, space collapses into bottomless holes, time slows down in the vicinity of a planet, and the boundless expanses of interstellar space ripple and sway like the surface of the sea …
