Interesting links there, James. Thanks. So much time and energy wasted on that stupid lambda fudge factor.
Einstein's ToR predicts the the universe can expand. He added the cosmological constant to allow for an universe in equilibrium or steady state. This is what was observed with the weak telescopes of his time. However, Edwin Hubble had the advantage of a more powerful telescope.
"Einstein heard about these results, and in the early 1930s,
he traveled to California and met with Hubble. At the Mount Wilson Observatory he saw the massive data set on distant galaxies that had led to “Hubble’s law” describing the expansion of the universe and got angry at himself: had he not forced his equations to stay static with that cosmological-constant invention of his, he could have
theoretically predicted Hubble’s findings!
That would have been worth a second Nobel Prize for him (he deserved a few more, anyway)—in the same way, for example, that the CERN scientists’ 2012 experimental discovery of the Higgs boson recently won
Peter Higgs the Nobel in 2013. In disgust, Einstein exclaimed after his Mount Wilson visit:
“If there is no quasi-static world, then away with the cosmological term!” and never considered the cosmological constant again. Or so we thought until recently."
Little did we and he know (since he died) that his lambda would return in the form of dark energy.
"
Dark Energy: Lambda Returns
When a genius such as Einstein makes a mistake, it tends to be a “good mistake.” (I am indebted to the mathematician Goro Shimura for this expression.) It can’t simply go away—there is too much thought that has gone into it. So, like a phoenix, Einstein’s cosmological constant made a remarkable comeback, very unexpectedly, in 1998.
That year, two groups of astronomers made an announcement that rocked the world of science. The “
Supernova Cosmology Project,” based in California and headed by Saul Perlmutter, and the “
High-Z SN Search” group at Harvard-Smithsonian and Australia, announced their results of the shifts of distant galaxies leading to a conclusion that nobody had expected: The universe, rather than slowing its expansion since the Big Bang, is actually
accelerating its expansion!
And it turns out that the best theoretical way to explain the accelerating universe is to revive Einstein’s discarded lambda. The cosmological constant (acting differently from how it was designed, as a force stopping the expansion) is the best explanation we have for the mysterious “
dark energy” seen to permeate space and push the universe ever outward at an accelerating rate. To most physicists today, lambda, cosmological constant, and dark energy
are closely synonymous. But unfortunately Einstein was not there to witness the reversal of his “greatest blunder,” having died in 1955.
And it has been widely assumed that he died without ever reconsidering the cosmological constant. Until now."
This is what
Fort Fun Indiana and I are arguing about. The Big Bang believers think this dark energy will increase the spacetime expansion forever while Einstein believed it could also cause a collapse. In an universe that is able to expand, we see that it is but the dark energy could cause a collapse, as well.
"In a closed geometry, the universe was born and will someday recollapse on itself. In an open geometry, it was born and will expand forever, and the same happens in a flat (
Euclidean) geometry. Based on modern theories supported by satellite observations of the
microwave background radiation in space, space-time is nearly perfectly Euclidean, meaning that the universe was born in a Big Bang and will expand forever, becoming less dense with time. Eventually, matter may decay into few kinds of elementary particles and photons, the distances among them growing to infinity."
The article also mentions the speeds of light and large masses which Einstein was never able to figure out. He was working on these things up to the day he died. We still do not understand gravity, speed of light and the missing mass even though the evolutionists think it's dark matter.
