Newton and not Einstein – The Father of Relativity

In 1704, Newton had published his famous Opticks, the work of him surpassed in fame by perhaps only his Principia Mathematika. As an appendix to the book, he had added his Queries, which were his speculations on areas of science that lay beyond his then methods of analysis. There his prolonged preoccupation with chemistry (or alchemy as it was known back then) were marked by his conjectures on the atomic theory of matter and even the theory of nuclei. But the most flabbergasting were the Queries 1 and 30, which stated, respectively: “Do not bodies act upon Light at a distance, and by their action bend its Rays?” and “Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another?” It seems as clear as daylight that Newton is conjecturing here the gravitational bending of light and the equivalence of mass and energy, both prime consequences of the theory of relativity of Einstein. The former phenomenon was first observed during the total solar eclipse of May 2019, and the latter is known to explain the source of energy of the stars like the Sun. The methods by which he arrived at his guesses are wholly mysterious and can perhaps only be compared to those of the untrained Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who startled the world of pure mathematics by his mathematical ingenuity. The best we can do is to bow down in awe to these geniuses.