Re: Analyse This!


Ahmed Ouahi, Architect wrote:
Analyse This!

" Among much else, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity suggested that
the universe must be either expanding or contracting. But Einstein was not a
cosmologist and he accepted the prevailing wisdom that the universe was
fixed and eternal.

More or less reflexively, he dropped into his equations something called the
cosmological constant, which arbitrarily counterbalanced the effects of
gravity, serving as a kind of mathematical pause button.

Books on the history of science always forgive Einstein this lapse, but it
was actually a fairly appalling piece of science and he knew it. He called
it ' the biggest blunder of my life '. "


The problem is that Einstein's "biggest blunder" may not have been a
blunder at all. New cosmological theories that try to explain how
universal expansion can be accelerating outwards may require a
cosmological constant, among other factors, to explain the runaway
universe. And it's not so appalling. It's an arbitrary factor that GR
can take or leave without changing the divergenceless properties of the
field equations

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