Slashdot Mirror
Einstein's Lost Model of the Universe Discovered 'Hiding In Plain Sight'
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Dick Ahlstrom reports that Irish researchers have discovered a previously unknown model of the universe written in 1931 by physicist Albert Einstein that had been misfiled and effectively "lost" until its discovery last August while researchers been searching through a collection of Einstein's papers put online by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "I was looking through drafts, but then slowly realised it was a draft of something very different," says Dr O'Raifeartaigh. "I nearly fell off my chair. It was hidden in perfect plain sight. This particular manuscript was misfiled as a draft of something else." Read more, below.
"In his paper, radically different from his previously known models of the universe, Einstein speculated the expanding universe could remain unchanged and in a " steady state" because new matter was being continuously created from space. "It is what Einstein is attempting to do that would surprise most historians, because nobody had known this idea. It was later proposed by Fred Hoyle in 1948 and became controversial in the 1950s, the steady state model of the cosmos," says O'Raifeartaigh. Hoyle argued that space could be expanding eternally and keeping a roughly constant density. It could do this by continually adding new matter, with elementary particles spontaneously popping up from space. Particles would then coalesce to form galaxies and stars, and these would appear at just the right rate to take up the extra room created by the expansion of space. Hoyle's Universe was always infinite, so its size did not change as it expanded. It was in a 'steady state'. "This finding confirms that Hoyle was not a crank," says Simon Mitton. "If only Hoyle had known, he would certainly have used it to punch his opponents." Although Hoyle's model was eventually ruled out by astronomical observations, it was at least mathematically consistent, tweaking the equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity to provide a possible mechanism for the spontaneous generation of matter. Einstein's paper attracted no attention because Einstein abandoned it after he spotted a mistake and then didn't publish it but the fact that Einstein experimented with the steady-state concept demonstrates Einstein's continued resistance to the idea of a Big Bang, which he at first found "abominable", even though other theoreticians had shown it to be a natural consequence of his general theory of relativity."
Einstein was not particularly good at embracing all of the consequences of his own work. He was firmly opposed to quantum theory, "Gott würfelt nicht!" (God does not throw dice) even though his Nobel prize for physics was actually for quantum theoretic work (figuring out the frequency of light quants I think) rather than his theories of relativity.
Even a 1 to a million scale model of the universe would be pretty big...
Another Hoyle cause, panspermia, which urges that the origin of life is so unlikely that a larger event space is needed, so life spreads through the galaxy as microbes once started somewhere, is getting somewhat of a second look. The idea that life may be hoping between planets in the solar system, hitchhiking on meteorites, is gaining adherents. While still a long way from a microbe populated interstellar cloud, or the solution to the statistical problem Hoyle was addressing, this is another echo of the importance of his thinking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
could a really smart ant model the entire earth?
did you forget to take your meds?
"a natural consequence of his general theory of relativity"
Is this to say the general theory of relativity produces a Big Bang? As in, because GR is true, BB is? What's the short explanation for that?
In cosmology, the Steady State theory is a now-obsolete theory and model alternative to the Big Bang theory of the universe's origin (the standard cosmological model).
Einstein probably knew it had flaws. The "steady state" model was later proposed ( 1960's) by Fred Hoyle, Jayant Narlikar and others .
One of the really attractive things about a Steady State Universe is that it does not require a beginning. It can be infinite in both space and time. This leaves time for the nearly impossible to occur without resort to special circumstances. It is fine for a monkey to hand us the works of Shakespeare now, if there has been infinite time already for him and his friends to bang on typewriters, but if they've only had 14 billion years so far, we might have to suppose they at least read the Cliff Notes. Being able to avoid those special circumstances means that the origin of life is to be expected as a mere accident. However, there is a problem with this solution to the very complex existing in less than infinite time: the monkey should be handing us a large number of copies of the the works of Shakespeare, not just one. So, the Fermi Paradox would seem to indicate that the Steady State Universe is not occurring, independent of all the observational evidence confirming the big bang. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Replying to self: Okay, didn't read too well on just waking up.
...emphasis added.
"Theoretical calculations showed that a static universe was im possible under general relativity"
I come here for the love
Both creative people and cranks have lots of wild ideas. The difference is that a crank reflexively defends his ideas with irrational vehemence. A creative person usually discard his ideas, because he knows there's always more where that comes from.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This kind of article bothers me immensely. It treats Einstein as the God of Science, and uses the fact the he worked on something as evidence that this idea is no crackpottery. Well, guess what, Einstein also shat, farted, pissed, had bad ideas, and even commited mathematical mistakes.
And one should never evaluate a scientific idea based on who's working on it. The Steady-State model of the universe is not a crackpot idea, simply because it is consistent with the laws of GR and (superficially) consistent with observational evidence. Philosophically, thought, it does seem quite silly, and I myself would never have regarded it as more than a mathematical curiosity, had it not been already falsified when I was born.
A more modern example would be 't Hooft's work on superdeterminisc models for quantum theory. The guy is obviously a genius, but this idea is pure insanity, and it saddens me to see people taking it seriously just because a Nobel prize is working on it.
entropy happens
If you are going to add a qualifier to Albert Einstein, please at least capitalize it, as in Physicist Albert Einstein like Lord Vishnu or something.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Physicist Sofia Koutsouveli from Moscow explored a very similar idea before Einstein.
:)
Physicists actually do believe in version of the Steady State theory, except instead of "new matter is continuously created as the universe expands", new space and new dark energy are continuously created. There's no contradiction with the Inflationary Big Bang theory at all.
this is a game, and he knew it. is not the constant expansion of a platform on which to produce the fundamental requirement of all simulation? when Einstein saw the probabilistic world, he regressed into denial. when he came to grips with the implications, he understood that life is merely the greatest RPG ever created... simply because there was no goal.
But "God does not throw dice", indeed. God (the universe) follows certain rules that allows us to assign probabilities to all possible outcomes of an event before it happens. But the outcome that actually happens is caused by God (the universe), which is infinitely complex. As we cannot account for all factors that influence the outcome at each given event, we resort to statistics.
However, even though Einstein is right, you can also prove him wrong: If God is the universe and we are part of the universe, we are part of God. As we can create and throw dice, it logically follows that God [i]does[/i] throw dice, in fact, as we are part of it. It's an obvious fact that comes from him being omnipotent.
I doubt if Einstein would have called himself anti-zionist because the meaning of zionism was a bit wider in those days. It's just that his strain of zionism has very little relation to Israel as we know it because he was not a nationalist and certainly not in favor of an ethnocracy.
But I think you could say he was a cultural zionist.
He was firmly opposed to the non-deterministic interpretation of QM, in the sense that he believed a really fundamental theory should be deterministic. He didn't doubt the predictive power of the theory. I think it's worthwile to make that distinction.
If a black hole forms in one part of the universe and another evaporates in another you may get an apparent constant density. There are likely colder regions of the universe further than we can see where black holes are evaporating.
The Wochit video is hilarious. It doesn't show the manuscript but Einstein is presented (in an old news clip) as the "world famous physicist who helped discover the atom bomb". I wonder where he discovered it. Did someone kick it into a tree or did it roll under a sofa?
H as in Hydrogen.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
That's really what Einstein's paper was about.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
And Einstein had nothing to do with it
Another example of Einstein's genius........working a multitude of competing or companion theories and having the courage and determination to throw away his hard work.............
todd
Technological intelligent life self-destructs.
You can see it happening all around you; after a certain point, tool-making creatures that modify their environments modify them to the point where they themselves cannot survive.
Or to put it another way, the yeast dies when all the sugar's been converted. That's certainly what our 1% believe - surely you can't believe that they'd be driving us to our ruin as fast as this if they didn't think it inevitable!
And not to forget Hoyle, as well. My bank account would *certainly* have benefitted from the principle of something from nothing ;-)
This statement remains as true now as when Einstein said it... as long as you use the many worlds interpretation of QFT. Which is the majority view anyway.