what do mean by general theory of relativity?

Answer 1

sigh...yes, 1st poster directly cut and pasted Wikipedia (loser) and the last poster stole Einstein's quote about relativity and the beautiful woman without giving due credit. the Einstein quote link is below you plagiarizing a@$.

Now my take on General Relativity:

This is how it works...Think of space as a blanket being held tight at all four corners. When a large object, say a bowling ball, is put in the middle of the blanket, it creates a depression in the blanket right?
General Relativity is the exact same thing.
Space-Time is like the blanket, and when a massive object, like a star, sits on/in Space-Time, it will create a depression in space that light and everything else will bend around. This effect is confirmed by phenomena like the Einstein Cross (also known as Gravitational Lensing). The Einstein Cross link below is a photo of the gravitational lensing effect. Note how there are 4 points of light around the central point. This happens because of a very massive object between us and the light, which causes the light to bend around the object, giving us multiple images of the same object.

General Relativity has been proven time and time again, and if you want more info i suggest a google search on it...

Canuckle: Thank you. I shouldnt have called you names anyway, i'm more mature than that :) But it was 2 in the morning and i'd had a few rum and cokes :) so i apologize.

Answer 2

General relativity [also called the general theory of relativity (GTR) and general relativity theory (GRT)] is the geometrical theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915/16. It unifies special relativity and Sir Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation with the insight that gravitation is not due to a force but rather is a manifestation of curved space and time, with this curvature being produced by the mass-energy and momentum content of the space-time. General relativity is distinguished from other metric theories of gravitation by its use of the Einstein field equations to relate space-time content and space-time curvature.

Actually The special theory of relativity was proposed in 1905 by Albert Einstein in his article "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies". Einstein's theory combines Galilean relativity with the postulate that all observers will always measure the speed of light to be the same no matter what their state of uniform linear motion is

Answer 3

the first poster there tries to act all smart when really he just copy and pasted the wikipedia definition, which means he doesnt know either but he wants 10 points for pretending to be smart.

I know im not smart but this is what i do (kind of) get from what I know of the theory of relativity.
Einstein concluded that "the flow of time in the universe does indeed differ depending on one’s reference frame." (thats me quoting a mate).
A very general meaning is, a person who touches his hand to a frying pan, one minute may feel like an hour to him. Whereas, when in the presence of a beautiful woman whom you love, one hour will fly by like it was a merely a minute.(Einstein)

Answer 4

In general, it tends to explain the existence and behaviours of massive bodies found in the Universe and deals with concepts like Time, Space, Dimensions etc. It's (sort of) opposite is Quantum Mechanics that deal with minute particles. Unfortunately both do not agree or 'meet' at a point. For detail, have a look here:
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/GenRelativity.html