Wikipedia:Today's featured article/April 18, 2010

General relativity is a theory of gravitation that was developed by Albert Einstein (pictured). According to general relativity, the observed gravitational attraction between masses results from the warping of space and time by those masses. Before the advent of general relativity, Newton's law of universal gravitation had been accepted. Experiments show that Einstein's description accounts for several effects that are unexplained by Newton's law. Some general relativity predictions have been confirmed by experiment, while others are the subject of ongoing research. General relativity has developed into an essential tool in modern astrophysics. It provides the foundation for the current understanding of black holes and of the standard Big Bang model of cosmology. Although general relativity is not the only relativistic theory of gravity, it is the simplest such theory that is consistent with the experimental data. Nevertheless, a number of open questions remain: the most fundamental is how general relativity can be reconciled with the laws of quantum physics to produce a complete and self-consistent theory of quantum gravity. (more...)

Recently featured: Flag of Japan – Federal Bridge Gross Weight Formula – "Ode on Indolence"