Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Space Science

Historians Rediscover Einstein's Forgotten Model of the Universe 35

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 This model was ultimately superseded by the Einstein-de Sitter model published the following year which improves on this in various ways and has since become the workhorse of modern cosmology.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Historians Rediscover Einstein's Forgotten Model of the Universe

Comments Filter:

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Working...