Understanding Dark Energy & Matter and Einstein’s Third Biggest Mistake
The Resonance Theory Programme
Dark Energy
The Hubble Red Shift
On the Deck with Chuck House
Inverting the Science
Spacetime and the Rubber Sheet
Einstein’s Third Biggest Mistake
Summary
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This week’s issue is dedicated to my late father, Robert H. Anderson, who 23 years ago asked me if Resonance Theory could explain dark energy.
If you ask any physicist or cosmologist, “What was Einstein’s biggest mistake?” they will inevitably mention the cosmological constant within general relativity, which he publicly waffled on in an embarrassing series of changes.
However, that would be wrong.
Longtime SNS members will recall our issue of 18 years ago by the same name (“SNS: Einstein’s Biggest Mistake,” 6/17/03) and its rather amazing backstory. Having stuck my neck out by insisting that this “honor” should go to Einstein’s decision to ignore the aether, I published the same and later shared it and related work with my friend, author Walter Isaacson, as he embarked on his now-famous biography of the great scientist.
And it was Walter, when I saw him a year later in Aspen, who insisted that not only had I gotten it right, but that Einstein himself, in a speech at the University of Leiden in 1920, had said exactly the same thing. Here are Einstein’s words from that day (emphasis mine):
Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity, space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether.
Wow.
In fact, by declaring (my paraphrase) “since we have no need of the ether, we shall never refer to it again” in his book with Louis Infeld, he made the most tragic mistake of his career. Among other costs, it directly prevented him from achieving his highest and lifelong goal, the discovery of a unified field theory that united general relativity with quantum mechanics.
As for the shenanigans with the cosmological constant – the parameter that measures the expansion of the universe itself – we’ll come back to that in a bit to see whether, after all the jiggering, he didn’t make an even greater error there, again caused by ignoring space itself.
