RELATIVITY MAKES UP EVERYTHING

The major problem in the Newton’s Theory on Gravitational phenomena is that it couldn’t explain anomalies like precession of Mercury’s orbit around the Sun. The suggestion provided by scientists that the gravitational effect of the Sun's Corona causing the Mercury not to complete closed revolutions, as predicted by Kepler’s Law, was easily discarded as the Corona doesn’t have much mass to influence Mercury's orbit. Even the external planetary influence was deemed to be very less to cause the precession. Therefore needed a key turnover in the way gravity was perceived. Rescue came when Henri Poincare plugged in Einstein’s theory of General Relativity to consider spacetime as a fabric where mass warps the spacetime around it was able to predict the precession as a phenomena of the wobble of the spacetime curvature and also predicted the precession rate as what was expected. The final nail in the coffin was hammered for Newton’s Theory of Gravity (although it works really well in smaller cases till today) was when Eddington’s expedition in 1919 found the bending of light from stellar systems occulted by the Sun. This laid the foundation of General Theory of Relativity and the concept of bending of space by mass.  

 

The concept of Mass bending space demanded the nature of Gravitational force to be modified. The bending of light by massive entities made the Space to be considered as a field or a fabric which gets modified by the presence of mass in it. So, as the concept of field is introduced, like electromagnetism, the nature of gravitational force also changes. Unlike Newton’s Gravitational Principle, the instantaneous nature of Gravity is now discarded and is now can’t be faster than the speed of light, the fastest entity that a field can accommodate. This brings a limit in how fast an event occurs and therefore Einstein's new theory constrains both space and time and they are together called Space-Time. So, just like any field, if a entity which can interact with the field moves across it, it creates ripples and waves in the field. Similarly, the mass which gets accelerated in Space-Time also should produce waves. There are the gravitational waves, predicted by General Relativity.