Einstein's Biggest Blunder! Einstein, Relativity and The Cosmological Constant

ALBERT EINSTEIN'S BIGGEST BLUNDER

Even the great physicist Albert Einstein made an utter foolishness? (He did!) But, the biggest quality of a scientist is to admit his mistakes, right?
Pic credits: Ugur Peker, Unsplash

THE COSMOLOGICAL CONSTANT

When you hear the term, what's your primary guess on that? It's something related to cosmology? Okay, it's something regarding cosmology. It's a constant? Well, again yes, it is a constant; an Albert Einstein Constant. It comes in Einstein law? Uh, what do you mean? Einstein Law? What is that?

So, let's get to it.

THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY

What is the theory of relativity? Everything is relative to one another. There is this Special Theory of Relativity which is regarding the elementary particles and their interactions and the General Theory of Relativity which is regarding the laws of gravitation and the other forces of the universe. The postulates of the Special Theory are:
1.The laws of physics are the same for all observers in uniform motion relative to one another (principle of relativity).
2.The speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers, regardless of their relative motion or of the motion of the light source.
The General Theory of Relativity is regarding the wrapping of space-time.

Talking of the Cosmological Constant or Einstein's Biggest Blunder, it's the General Theory of Relativity and its equations that matter.

THE HISTORY

The General Relativity equations are so complicated and non-linear and a headache to anyone operating it. Even Einstein couldn't handle with it! So, he made some assumptions about the universe and simplified the equation and solved it. The solutions were quite puzzling. They indicated that the universe is either expanding or contracting. Einstein thought, 'well, how can that be possible? The universe is static, after all.' So, in order to remove this puzzling fact, he introduced a term to the equation - The Cosmological Constant. 'Okay, now the universe is static.' Wait! He introduced a new term for no scientific reason? Just to make the existing theories right? Well, yes, he did.

Later, Edwin Hubble proved that the universe is expanding! (The Hubble's Law) Okay, so now, the universe is no more static. That's what Einstein had discovered at first with his General Theory of relativity. Now Einstein states, 'the biggest blunder of my life - the cosmological constant.'

And that's the story of The Cosmological Constant. Hope y'all enjoyed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Time Dilation Explained!

Image
T IME D ILATION You hear people saying ‘time slows down’ or ‘time speeds up’; ‘You can travel back into your past’ or ‘you can time travel to your future’ and blah blah time time. Or you might have seen the movie Interstellar and was like ‘Ohh! No way! That’s not possible’ or ‘But how?’ or ‘No, he can’t get younger than his daughter!’ You wanna know how? I shall tell you. The thing is, when you travel faster, time slows down for you. Time is relative. As beautifully explained by Einstein, for a man sitting with a pretty girl, an hour seems like a minute, and for him sitting on a hot stove, a minute seems more than an hour. It is a fact! Can’t accept it? Consider, a photon trapped perpendicularly in between two parallel mirrors. It bounces off from one to the other, continuously. alt="time dilation explained for anyone" The yellow dot is the photon, and its motion is depicted by the arrowheads. ‘d’ is the distance travelled by the photon from one mirror t
Read more

Alien Life - Where are our eyes?

Life outside Earth We have been thinking of life outside earth since time immemorial. And when it comes to the scientific search of extraterrestrial life, what and where are we searching for? The primary question - what , is thought worthy.  We assume that the Life outside Earth is like the Life on Earth. We assume the life to be water-based and to share many such similarities. Why so? Life outside could be of any form. It really need not be water based. It really need not have the needs of the terrestrial life, say, oxygen. But, it is easier to look for life with this assumption, for, as the old joke goes, the old man who lost his keys at night will search for it under the streetlights. So, although we know that life on Earth could not be representative of life elsewhere, we take up the assumption while we scout for extraterrestrial life. A similar approach is also usually taken while we decide where to hunt for life. We look for Sun-like stars and Earth-like orbits and temperatures,
Read more

Gravitational Waves: when black holes are Mittu aunt's Ladoos!!

Image
Suppose…     ...you have two ladoos in hand. You weighed each and found one 8 and the other 12 grams. Now, you want a bigger ladoo from those two and, wuhooo!, here I am with a glowing bulb over my head and helping hands. You hand them over to me, and I crush them both and mould the crumps of both ladoos together making a bigger ladoo for you. But, as you weigh the bigger ladoo I just made, you find it to be 17 gram. 12 + 8 = ???! Haa, yes, there arises a question on the missing 3 gram! So, what yeh gonna do? Huh! Blame me?? Nah, I didn’t - I didn’t eat it. Okay, so what’s the matter? Consider these ladoos to be black holes . Yeah, I mean it. Such a case was found with black holes as well. It was found that two black holes of solar masses 36 and 29, collapsed not to form a black hole of 36 + 29 = 65 solar mass, but of 62 solar mass. The missing 3 solar mass here went into the production of gravitational waves. And, that was the birth of gravitational waves . Not just
Read more