The Biggest Misconception in Physics

Imagine you're an astronaut out drifting in deep space. When you throw a rock as hard as you can, what's going to happen to that rock? Well, you would think that it would continue with constant velocity in a straight line. That's just Newton's first law.

But what actually happens is it eventually slows down and stops. So why does this happen? Where did all the rocks energy go? At the turn of the 20th century, the problem of energy conservation baffled some of the greatest minds, including Albert Einstein.

Einstein came up with a possible solution. But then a littleknown unpaid mathematician named Emmy Nutter proved he was wrong. And in doing so, she created a whole new paradigm for physics. One that underlies all of particle physics and explains why anything is conserved.

It all started in 1915 at the University of Gingan where Einstein was giving six lectures on his new theory of gravity, what would become the general theory of relativity. The lectures were wellreceived, but Einstein hadn't yet settled on the final form of the field equations. One problem he was facing was how to show that total energy was conserved in his new theory. This is the whole beginning of this story, right?

Classically they thought they had this understanding of what the energy of a gravitational field was. All of a sudden with these new equations they go where is it? You know is it in the curvature? You know is it in the stress energy tensure?

Where's the term that we're looking for? Einstein suggested that the principle of conservation of energy long established as a bedrock of physics might hold the key to working out the correct field equations. In the audience, legendary mathematician David Hilbert was intrigued. So he started to look for the energy conservation equations in Einstein's new theory.

But the best he could find was a set of equations known as the Bianke identities. They showed that energy was conserved but only in a completely empty universe. So for one like ours filled with stuff, they seemed useless. Hilbert was stumped.

Fortunately, he knew just the person for the job. his new assistant Emmy Nutter. From an early age, Nutter had dreamed of following in the footsteps of her father, a mathematics professor at the University of Erlingan. She got special permission to attend lectures at the ...