AllMovie

Everyone knows the name Albert Einstein, but few people know of the 15-year long battle he waged to prove his groundbreaking Theory of Relativity while the world was in the grip of war and he was contending with remarkable adversity in his personal life. The year was 1907, and Einstein was about to challenge two centuries of scientific belief. According to the scientific mastermind, Sir Isaac Newton had it all wrong; gravity was not pulling us towards the Earth, but massive celestial bodies like the sun and the planets were constantly bending time and space, around us, pushing us towards the ground with every movement. But scientists weren't convinced, so in order to prove his theory, Einstein surmised that we would need to take a photo of a solar eclipse. He theorized that light from a distant star, while traveling around the sun, would be bent by the sun's gravitational pull. In the aftermath of that announcement, astronomers across the globe raced to photograph an eclipse in order to verify or debunk Einstein's claim. But getting that photograph was no simple task, because in the years that followed the war, weather, and mathematical mistakes undermined the astronomers' efforts at every turn. When the photo was finally taken in 1922, Einstein's theory was proven correct, elevating him to the status of global icon.