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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 This model was ultimately superseded by the Einstein-de Sitter model published the following year which improves on this in various ways and has since become the workhorse of modern cosmology.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 Hindu's have some mindbogglingly long number they came up with like 12000 years ago that's supposed to be how long the Universe spends between Big Bangs, before it's reborn. As in the Hindu religion there is no death, no end of the world, everything cycles on, in a perpetual reincarnation way. I think it's one of the biggest numbers that humans ever came up with, bigger than Aristotle's cattle problem, but not sure. I'm too lazy to research it and look up references and substantiate claims for it right now, but there you have it, a fleeting idea.
He misspelled the guy's name several times? Then he's an idiot, and any point he's trying to make is worthless.
#DeleteChrome
This is basically a peer review of an unpublished draft paper by Einstein.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.
No, we're not going to have a Big Crunch, as far as we can be certain of anything. As TFA says Einstein and De Sitter published an updated model a year later that went with the "expanding universe" theory.
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.
an occasional
goes a long way bro
Archimedes' Sand Reckoner is considerably bigger. He's calculating the number of possible grains of sand in the world and comes up with a number equivalent to 10^63. He also talks abstractly about numbers far, far bigger than that, up to (10^8)^(10^8).
His goal wasn't really to calculate anything, just to show that numbers keep going up without becoming infinite.