Slashdot Mirror
Historians Rediscover Einstein's Forgotten Model of the Universe
KentuckyFC writes In 1931, after a 3- month visit to the U.S., Einstein penned a little known paper that attempted to show how his theory of general relativity could account for some of the latest scientific evidence. In particular, Einstein had met Edwin Hubble during his trip and so was aware of the latter's data indicating that the universe must be expanding. The resulting model is of a universe that expands and then contracts with a singularity at each end. In other words, Einstein was studying a universe that starts with a big bang and ends in a big crunch. What's extraordinary about the paper is that Einstein misspells Hubble's name throughout and makes a number of numerical errors in his calculations. That's probably because he wrote the paper in only 4 days, say the historians who have translated it into English for the time. This model was ultimately superseded by the Einstein-de Sitter model published the following year which improves on this in various ways and has since become the workhorse of modern cosmology.
He spelled Hubble as "Hubbel", german way. Hubbel is also a german word meaning "bump".
For some reason I don't find Einstein making a spelling mistake particularly extraordinary. Sounds like a particularly ordinary thing for an un-edited manuscript and a unusual name like "Hubble".
If making a spelling mistake is extraordinary, then /.ers are making extraordinary posts all the time.
The name is only wrong relative to Hubble's own preference.
Dunno much about astronomy, but sometimes ago some online reports that I read, they say that the universe gonna expands and expands and expands, that they were looking for signs of that "Big Crunch" but they couldn't find it
But if Einstein's paper is to be true, then perhaps they are looking for "Big Crunch" at the wrong place
So he was working on zip-t?
He misspelled the guy's name several times? Then he's an idiot, and any point he's trying to make is worthless.
#DeleteChrome
You're worthless! You're all worthless! Only I have any worth around here! My ego is the biggest! I know it's true because I said so!
This is basically a peer review of an unpublished draft paper by Einstein. It would have been interesting to have Einstein's response, but on the other hand Einstein-de Sitter model is the result of further dialogue.
The EdS model is not "the workhorse of modern cosmology", no matter what the author of this summary wants you to think. If any model could be described thus it would be the Friedman-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker model, which was already known (thanks to Friedman and Lemaitre who developed it in the 20s) by 1931. The EdS model is a specialisation of the FLRW to a universe containing pure pressureless matter, and an expansion is necessarily decelerating. As such not only can it not describe the early universe, when the existence of the CMB and the expansion of the universe together imply a period where the universe was instead dominated by radiation, nor the late universe, where observations imply that expansion is instead accelerating. EdS was used as an approximation to the late time universe until the 90s when it was obvious that it was in conflict with observation. It's sometimes still used for rough approximations thanks to the simple solutions one can find for linear perturbations, but those are only valid up to redshifts of approximately 1, and no later.
Then read the German original here.
Someone must have thrown that one-click shopping patent in his in box.
Have gnu, will travel.