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Galaxy Clusters' Stunted Growth Confirms Dark Energy
A new study of 86 galaxy clusters in the early universe has provided independent confirmation of the existence of dark energy. In its absence, gravity's pull should have caused the number of clusters to increase by a factor of 50 over the last 5.5 billion years. What is observed is a factor of 10 increase. "Together with earlier observations... the new data strengthen the suspicion — but do not prove — that dark energy is a weird antigravity called the cosmological constant that was hypothesized and then abandoned by Albert Einstein as a 'blunder' almost a century ago. If that is true, the universe is fated to empty itself out eventually, and all but the Milky Way's closest neighbors will eventually be out of sight. ... Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins and the Space Telescope Science Institute, said: 'If this was a fox hunt and dark energy was the fox, I think they have closed off another escape route. But there is still a lot of terrain left for the fox, and we've seen little more than a glimmer of fur.'"
Welcome to "Science by Consensus."
You really need to educate yourself if you honestly believe Einstein, a man who graduated in 1900 with a physics degree from ETH Zurich with a physics degree, was a layman.
Are you saying he was secretly a professional physicist? His alter-ego was Relativity Man, and along with Niels Bohr (Atomic Model Man), Max Planck (Quanta Man), and a host of others, he met in the Halls of Physics to save the world from the photoelectric paradox, non-atomic theory, and other science evil-doers? My comic book on Einstein said he didn't join the Physics League until late 1905.
Seriously though, he was less than five years out of school and working at the Patent Office when he published his first orthodoxy-shattering theory. He wasn't a layman like you and I are, but he was hardly a member of the physics establishment.
(My apologies if you're less than five years out of school and and this touched a sensitive nerve.)