Einstein's Biggest Blunder That Wasn't

jose parinas writes "The genius of Albert Einstein, who added a "cosmological constant" to his equation for the expansion of the universe but later retracted it, may be vindicated by new research. The enigmatic "dark energy" that drives the acceleration of the Universe behaves just like Einstein's famed cosmological constant, according to the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS). Their observations reveal that the dark energy behaves like Einstein's cosmological constant to a precision of 10%."

Comments

Awesome

[CriminalNerd]

Will Einstein's genius never cease to amaze us post-humously? Probably not.

This will be a great thing for students to look up if they are doing (or going to do) relativity in school.

Still a blunder?

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, Einstein "fudged" his equations (i.e., introduced the cosmological constant) to stop them from predicting that the universe would expand. Subsequently, Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding after all. Still later, it was found that the rate of expansion was not in line with Einstein's un-fudged equations. Since then, the value of the cosmological constant has really depended on what value you measure for the expansion of the universe.

So, why is this news?

Re:Density, exactly...

[earthbound kid]

How would you know that space-time was denser? When you move your ruler inside of it, wouldn't the ruler's size fit the density of space, showing in the case of the basketball that can fit a house that it actually is the size of a house, since it can fit a house's worth of rulers inside? Since space is just a measure of distance and distance is a measure of chemical bonds strengths over space and whatnot, it seems like it would be hard to measure space to be any more or less than 1/1.

Re:I can't take it... (grammar nazi alert)

[Phisbut]

Still it's rude and it's a way to humiliate a member for something %80 of people make.

If it's such a common mistake, then maybe it is a *good* thing to point it out in an attempt to educate the masses, wouldn't you think so? There was nothing humiliating in the way the grammar-nazi pointed it out. If one feels humiliated simply because somebody pointed out an error, then that person has issues.