Einstein’s Incredible Universe

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About The Film

Narrated By: Keegan-Michael Key

Formats: All Digital 2D and 3D Formats

Run Time: 45 Minutes or 25 Minutes

Space that can warp and ripple. Time that can slow down and speed up. Buckle up for the ultimate ride through the mind-bending universe of Albert Einstein.

Filmed for IMAX theatres and the galaxy’s largest screens, Einstein’s Incredible Universe plunges audiences into the imagination of Albert Einstein at the moment of his greatest discoveries, and explores the unseen forces that shape our universe. 

Along the way, we meet two leading astrophysicists: black hole hunter Andrea Ghez and gravitational wave expert Nergis Mavalvala. Their groundbreaking discoveries are building on Einstein’s ideas in ways that would have astonished even him. Featuring awe-inspiring footage of a total solar eclipse, gravity-defying sky divers, roller coasters, and falling elevators, the film will transform our understanding of the universe and celebrate the power of curiosity in all of us.

Available in 2D and 3D giant screen formats, Einstein’s Incredible Universe premieres in Spring 2027.

Meet Your Galactic Explorers

We meet Albert Einstein not as the iconic, famous scientist, but as a curious boy full of questions.

While building a house of cards one day, he asks a seemingly simple question: what makes things fall down? This sets in motion a decades long search for answers that eventually revolutionizes our understanding of gravity, space, time and reality itself.

The film takes audiences inside the laboratory of Albert’s imagination as he conducts a series of mind bending “thought experiments”, testing ideas in his mind that at first seem impossible. Indeed, some of his predictions would take decades, even centuries to prove.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

– Albert Einstein

Andrea Ghez was just 4 years old when she watched the Apollo 11 moon landing on TV. Her early fascination led her to study astrophysics, with a particular focus on one of the strangest things to emerge from Einstein’s ideas: black holes.

By the early 1990s, hundreds of black holes had been discovered. Yet there was another kind of black hole that remained shrouded in mystery: supermassive black holes (1 million to 1 billion times the mass of our Sun). Convinced that these supermassive black holes are found at the center of galaxies, Andrea set out to test her theory in the heart of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. At first, few thought her experiment would work.

Using the W.M. Keck Telescope, one of the largest telescopes in the world, Andrea tracked the motions of stars in the center of our galaxy over 3 decades. The result was definitive proof of a supermassive black hole 4 million times the mass of our Sun. In 2020, Andrea became the 4th woman in history to win the Nobel Prize for Physics.

“I hope I can inspire other young women into the field. It’s a field that has so many pleasures, and if you are passionate about science, there’s so much that can be done.” – Andrea Ghez

For more information see galacticcenter.astro.ucla.edu and astro.ucla.edu/~ghez

Nergis Mavalvala grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. She recalls an early experience of witnessing a summer meteor shower from her rooftop apartment and being filled with curiosity about the universe.

As an undergrad, Nergis moved to the U.S. to study physics at MIT. She later became part of a huge effort to detect Einstein’s elusive gravitational waves, something he predicted as part of his General Theory of Relativity in 1916.

Working with hundreds of scientists for decades, Nergis helped build Advanced LIGO, a project consisting of two massive detectors (one in Louisiana, the other in Washington), capable of sensing tiny shifts in the shape of space and time.

In 2015, Advanced LIGO made the first detection of gravitational waves and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2017. Since then, LIGO has detected hundreds of events, launching a new era in astrophysics and offering a completely new way of studying the universe.

Today, Nergis is the Dean of the School of Science at MIT.

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu

“For most of human history, most of our cosmic news has come to us through a single messenger: light. But thanks to Einstein and gravitational wave science, we now have another messenger: gravity. We are seeing things that no telescope can see. And maybe one day, we’ll be able to detect gravitational waves from the first moments after the Big Bang. Perhaps then, we can begin to answer the question: where do we come from?” - Nergis Mavalvala

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Filming a historic solar eclipse

Einstein’s Incredible Universe

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