![]() ![]() Two years ago, scientists announced they had directly detected gravitational waves, literal ripples in the fabric of spacetime. And the cosmological constant, as a fudge factor that changes how spacetime interacts with energy, is still a leading contender. When astronomers learned, to their astonishment, that the rate of the universe’s expansion was increasing - that galaxies were growing apart faster over time - they called the mysterious force responsible dark energy. When he learned, in subsequent decades, that the universe is actually expanding, he supposedly exclaimed “Then away with the cosmological constant!” He famously considered it his biggest blunder.īut even Einstein’s mistakes are informative. To make them fit the data, he added the factor, which he named the cosmological constant, into the equations. Everyone back then assumed, based on the information available, that the universe was static, unchanging place, but his equations kept disagreeing. When he was crafting his theory of gravity, general relativity, Einstein needed a bit of a fudge factor. ![]() ![]() ![]() He was human, just like the rest of us, and did make some mistakes. That’s usually the case: Scientists try to disprove Einstein, and Einstein always wins.īut that’s not to say the man was infallible. Recent months have featured a few stories about how Albert Einstein’s theories, or the ideas underpinning them, have all been confirmed to a new degree of accuracy. ![]()
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