All Things
- The Final Anthropic Principle And The Antichrist
Pierre Teilhard de ChardinIn their popular science book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, published in 1986, cosmologists John Barrow and Frank Tipler define three different anthropic principles:1. The weak anthropic...
- The Scientific Work Of Stephen Hawking
The scientific work of Stephen Hawking has been quite productive, although the media, influenced by his sad personal situation, tend to exaggerate its importance, putting him sometimes at the level of Einstein. His most renowned works are the following:The...
- The Multiverse Does Not Solve The Fine Tuning Problem
Atheists use the multiverse theories to escape the need to accept God?s existence as the cause of a universe which seems to have been designed to make life possible (fine tuning). While they do this, they are contradicting one of their most beloved arguments...
- The Multiverse And The Fine Tuning Problem
The multiverse theories appeared in cosmology over half a century ago, but they have proliferated and spread starting at the eighties, together with the discovery of the fine tuning problem, the verification that the universe appears to have been designed...
- The God Particle
Peter HiggsWith the discovery of Higgs boson, two years ago, the media and a few scientists have presented the discovery as the final completion of the standard theory of particle physics, in such a way that we now know everything and do not need God....
All Things
Einstein?s mistake
When Einstein formulated in 1915 his theory of general relativity, he soon applied it to the entire universe, deriving the following cosmological equation:
It is curious that this equation is identical to the equation that would result from Newton?s theory of gravitation. There is only one difference: constant k represents, in Newton?s case, the total energy of the universe; in Einstein?s case, its curvature.
Each term of this equation contains a universal constant. Besides k, G is the gravitational constant; L is called the cosmological constant, whose interpretation is not clear. Einstein initially thought he could eliminate this term by making L = 0, which simplifies the equation and makes it analytically solvable. Then he discovered that the solution, in that case, was a universe in constant expansion. Since he believed that the universe had to be stationary, he decided to assign the constant a critical value L = Lc, to make it be so.
Unfortunately for Einstein, a few years later two things were discovered:
- The universe is actually expanding (Lemaître and Hubble).
- Einstein?s universe with L=Lc is stationary, but unstable. Any small disturbance would make it go into an endless expansion or a contraction to zero volume.
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| Albert Einstein |
When he realized these two things, Einstein said that introducing the cosmological constant was the biggest mistake he had made. However, in 1998, when the accelerating expansion of the universe was discovered , cosmologists recovered the cosmological constant to explain this phenomenon, and equated the third term of Einstein?s equation with the mysterious dark energy.
The problem is we do not know what dark energy may be. If it exists (this is not yet proven) it would probably be a new fundamental interaction of the universe, apart from the four we know. This would be as big news as the discovery of radioactivity in the late nineteenth century: a whole new field would be open to physics. Also its value seems to be quite small, very close to zero, which does not square with quantum field theories that have tried to explain it as the vacuum energy, according to which its value should be 10120 higher. M.P. Hobson and his colleagues have called this the worst theoretical prediction of the history of physics.
In conclusion, we have two possibilities:
- If dark energy does not exist, if the accelerating universe were an artifact or could be explained otherwise (some physicists are analyzing these two possibilities), perhaps Einstein was right when he said that introducing the cosmological constant was the biggest mistake he had made.
- But if dark energy really exists and the cosmological constant has the value the standard model assigns to it (10-52 m-2), then Einstein?s mistake would have been saying the words quoted in the previous paragraph.
Manuel Alfonseca
- The Final Anthropic Principle And The Antichrist
Pierre Teilhard de ChardinIn their popular science book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, published in 1986, cosmologists John Barrow and Frank Tipler define three different anthropic principles:1. The weak anthropic...
- The Scientific Work Of Stephen Hawking
The scientific work of Stephen Hawking has been quite productive, although the media, influenced by his sad personal situation, tend to exaggerate its importance, putting him sometimes at the level of Einstein. His most renowned works are the following:The...
- The Multiverse Does Not Solve The Fine Tuning Problem
Atheists use the multiverse theories to escape the need to accept God?s existence as the cause of a universe which seems to have been designed to make life possible (fine tuning). While they do this, they are contradicting one of their most beloved arguments...
- The Multiverse And The Fine Tuning Problem
The multiverse theories appeared in cosmology over half a century ago, but they have proliferated and spread starting at the eighties, together with the discovery of the fine tuning problem, the verification that the universe appears to have been designed...
- The God Particle
Peter HiggsWith the discovery of Higgs boson, two years ago, the media and a few scientists have presented the discovery as the final completion of the standard theory of particle physics, in such a way that we now know everything and do not need God....