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Einstein's Biggest Blunder That Wasn't

Posted by samzenpus on from the he-told-you-so dept.

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%."

2 of 303 comments (clear)

  1. Still a blunder? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  2. Re:Density, exactly... by earthbound+kid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.