Albert Einstein’s General Relativity has a close connection to Isaac Newton as the theory was built as both a correction and expansion to Newton’s ideas on gravity. Newtonian physics describes gravity as a force which pulls objects towards each other: its laws explaining why planets orbit the Sun, why objects fall to Earth, and how motion operates in everyday life. With General Relativity, Einstein challenged the notion that gravity was simply a force acting upon a flat, empty space, postulating instead that the area surrounding large objects is bent or warped, with nearby smaller bodies moving along these spatial curves. Further, Einstein filled in some gaps; where Newtonian laws could not fully explain situations involving extremely strong gravity, or very high speeds, such as black holes and gravitational waves.
Calling Newton’s work ‘wrong’ would be somewhat misleading. His laws still work very well for explaining ordinary situations on Earth. Perhaps Newtonian mechanics are still taught in academic settings because they may be easier to understand and are accurate enough for everyday engineering and basic physics. While lacking the level of detail of Einstein’s theory, Newtonian laws apply well enough for terrestrial construction projects such as building a bridge, where considerations such as speed of light or black holes are unnecessary.
Gravitational waves are another concept of General Relativity, which describes how tiny ripples in space-time are caused by massive cosmic events, such as when enormous bodies collide. Scientists only recently directly detected them in 2015 as part of the LIGO experiment, so its research is still largely theoretical as opposed to practical. But, as with many discoveries before, such as electricity or radio waves, which were initially deemed impractical and yet led to transformative technologies, so too may research into these waves yield promising results in areas of navigational or other advanced engineering systems.