But despite the outcry provoked by the steps forward made by Einstein in 1905, we are not yet at his masterpiece. Einstein’s triumph is the second theory of relativity, the theory of general relativity, published ten years later, when he was thirty-five. The theory of general relativity is the most beautiful theory produced by physics, and the first of the pillars of quantum gravity. It is at the heart of the narrative of this book. Here the real magic of twentieth-century physics begins.
