Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Historians Rediscover Einstein's Forgotten Model of the Universe

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: In 1931, after a 3- month visit to the US , 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 This model was ultimately superseded by the Einstein-de Sitter model published the following year which improves on this in various ways and has since become the workhorse of modern cosmology.

Slashdot Top Deals

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.

Close