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    A Letter to Einstein from the Future

    by Steven Gubser & Frans Pretorius Sep 14, 2017 4 minutes

    We don’t believe in time travel, and we’re not into mysticism. But what if we could write a letter to Albert Einstein to tell him about gravity and black holes in a few paragraphs? We’d write something like this letter.

    Steven Gubser and Frans Pretorius
    Department of Physics, Princeton University
    July 2017 

    Dear Albert,

    First, you’re the greatest. The one equation in physics that everyone knows is = . magazine named you the Person of the Century. Einstein jokes aren’t told much anymore because everyone sees the punch lines coming from a mile away. We’ve got a gazillion nuclear weapons, but we haven’t blown ourselves up yet. In fact, the atom bombs dropped at the end of World War II are the only ones ever used to

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