Albert Einstein believed in a static universe. On a grand scale, the universe looked essentially the same 14 billion years ago, and would look essentially the same for the next 14 billion years. Then Einstein’s very own theory of general relativity led physicists to hypothesize a beginning — the Big Bang. The result proved the universe was not static, but very much dynamic. It was “an instance of creation in the equations of a hard-core scientist,” Prof. Sylvester James Gates, professor of physics at the University of Maryland, said.