What was Einstein’s most mind-blowing discovery? | Ask an astronomer | Michelle Thaller | Big Think

What was Einstein’s most mind-blowing discovery?

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NASA astronomer and science communicator Michelle Thaller explains that the real brilliance of Albert Einstein is that he was able to bridge ideas that appeared to others to be in different realms.

The thing Einstein is most famous for is the equation E=mc2. Thaller explains why that equation is so mind-blowing: Pure energy and matter are the same thing. That means, as humans, we are both made of matter and of pure energy, and as pure energy, we would not experience space or time.

"I think that, once we really understand this, we're going to be in for some very difficult truths to accept," says Thaller. "It may be that there is no space or time as we know it, really."

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MICHELLE THALLER:

Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her offhours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit

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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHELLE THALLER: If you were to convert my hand into pure energy using Einstein's equation you could have nuclear Armageddon on a global scale. There is so much mass in here that if you were to convert me into pure energy I could blow up the planet.

There are very few people in the world where I just simply say their name and you immediately can picture them, probably many different images of them, and one of them certainly is Einstein. I just say that word and all of a sudden you're thinking about crazy white hair and the mustache, somebody who is brilliant, you know, those wonderful unknowing eyes with lots of smile lines around them. Everybody knows who Einstein is and people understand that he was a very famous scientist, but I think that people often don't grasp the true depth and the profound nature of the things that Einstein introduced to us.

I also spend a lot of time debunking, in some ways, the myth of Albert Einstein. A lot of people seem to think that he was somebody that worked outside of traditional academics, he wasn't part of the academic establishment, he came up with all this brilliant stuff all by himself. Well, that wasn't true either. Einstein was a professor, he actually taught a lot at the University of Bern and also in Berlin and then eventually came to Princeton. He was very much a product of the time and the science that was going on. There were brilliant people at this time. Science was changing in so many different ways and for a lot of things Einstein found himself kind of in the right place at the right time to see two different things going on and say ah-ha, those things actually go together. And to me that really was some of the real brilliance of Einstein, was that he became a bridge between many, many different subject matters.

It amazes me that he was one of the people when he was doing his doctoral dissertation, who figured out the size and speed of molecules in the air all around you. People didn't realize at the time, when Einstein was a younger student in college, that air was made of molecules, little things that are constantly bouncing off each other and bouncing off of you and that's what we think of as air. And it became known that there was a tremendous number of these. To give you an idea, in about a square foot of air, if I had about a square foot of air of volume in front of me, how many molecules are in a square foot of air? The answer is approximately 10 to the 23, which means a one with 23 zeros after that. That's such a big number we don't have a name for it. And all of those molecules are bouncing off you at hundreds of miles an hour. Can you imagine when they realized that's what air really was? Einstein was a major figure in that and then there was so many other things he did.

But I think if I were to...

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