While supporting his sick parents, Moffat spent his free time in the library, teaching himself in the course of a year both modern physics and the mathematics needed to work in it. Then, daringly, he wrote a letter to Einstein, identifying problems in one of the great man's papers. A correspondence was struck, but, because Moffat couldn't read German, he would take the letters to his barber to have them translated. The press caught wind of the story, which brought Moffat to the attention of Niels Bohr.With Einstein and Bohr's help, Moffat soon began a doctorate at Cambridge. His first bold stroke had taken him far, and would take him farther, ultimately to point out not just some of Einstein's small mistakes, but to revise his entire theory. Physicists have long known that something is wrong: Einstein's relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics are fundamentally incompatible, which has prompted the last twenty years' work in string theory. But Moffat has identified a bigger problem: not only does Einstein's theory not work in the world of the small, it doesn't seem to work in the world of the very large either.

About the Author

John Moffat is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Toronto and an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo and a resident affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada. Moffat earned a doctorate in physics at the University of Cambridge.