The universe, as any respectable physicist will tell you, can be a peculiar place. It is, after all, filled with peculiar things, holes (mostly black or wormy), dark matter, string, branes and so on. Come to think of it, there’s also the issue of toast. Specifically, its propensity to alway land. butter-side down. Luckily, there is Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Also known as the ‘8th Wonder of the World’.

Imagine…

Somewhere, far, far away, in either this universe or another parallel one, there exists a pub. A fine affair with a majolica tiled exterior and fine, carved walnut fittings. A multiplicity of snug little bars and fine ale. It floats, comfortably, in a gravitationally ambiguous pocket of a universe. This pub, is, obviously, named The Event Horizon, and is frequented by the kind of travellers who don’t generally bother concerning themselves with things like “up” or “down,” “now” or “then.” Patrons range from hyperintelligent octopodes to android poets who, rather ironically, lack the ability to rhyme, or, equally, not to rhyme, depending upon when you listen to them.

One evening, an unusually large crowd had gathered in the pub’s central public bar. An alien cove, small in stature and with three eyes was pointing excitedly at a poster which, not unlike the travel posters of the early twentieth century English railways, showed a beautiful rendering of a scene on an idyllic planet. Across the top of the poster, a banner headline said ‘Visit Earth, the home of E=mc²’.

“Think what that actually means,” said the three eyed geyser.

"The Theory of Relativity might not seem like a “wonder” in the sense of a Taj Mahal, or a Niagara Falls. It’s more of a thought so vast and intricate that it reshaped how we understand the universe.

Relativity is about relationships. Not the kind between people, no ‘Albert Loves Doris’ carved into a tree or ‘that’s my Grandad,’ but about the relationship between space, time, matter, and energy. So everything really. It started simply enough with Special Relativity, a theory that introduced the famous equation E=mc². Those five characters revealed that energy and matter were two sides of the same coin, interchangeable. The same thing in different forms. Suddenly, the stars weren’t just twinkling, far off suns, they were engines of immense energy, converting tiny amounts of mass into vast outpourings of light and heat.

But Special Relativity was only the start. A decade later came General Relativity, an altogether more whacky idea. Suddenly gravity wasn’t some mysterious force reaching out invisibly through space and causing apples to fall off trees. Instead, massive objects like planets and stars had enough gravity to warp space and time around them. Space wasn’t just a flat stage; it bent and curved in response to the mass and energy within it.

A whole industry of analogies sprung up. Perhaps the best known is the old ‘heavy bowling ball on a trampoline’ malarkey. The surface of the trampoline dips around the ball, and anything smaller, a marble, perhaps, rolls toward it. This is how Einstein described gravity. Not a thing that just pulled; it was the natural consequence of objects following the curves of space-time. Now we have a framework that not only explains why apples fall but also why light bends around stars, why planets follow their elliptical orbits, and why time itself slows down near massive objects.

And the practical implications of Relativity are as astonishing as the theory itself. Take GPS systems in phones and cars down on Earth, for example. They rely on Einstein’s equations. Without accounting for the warping of time caused by Earth’s gravity, GPS satellites would be off by several kilometres every day. They’d be useless. Not to mention an endless stream of technologies like nuclear energy, proving that a tiny amount of mass could unleash unimaginable power.

Yet the true wonder of Relativity lies not in its applications but in its reach. And for all its complexity, Einstein’s vision was surprisingly simple. He sought to understand the universe in the clearest terms possible, to uncover its underlying elegance. “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible,” he once wrote. It’s this spirit of wonder that makes his work timeless. That’s why it’s the 8th Wonder of the World not because it is visible, but because it illuminates the invisible. Nice poster too."

Another alien cove, a super-sized brown lipped snail named Brian took one look at the poster, slurped his pint of Gargle-Blaster, and said: “load of old twonk.”