Einstein's Findings    HHC 70

To tell the story of the discovery of the birthplace of the universe is to tell the story of Albert Einstein.

Einstein can be seen as a power that destroys one world, - the cosmology of Newton, - and creates another.

Newton's world-view was that brilliant and profound system of insights that had endured for three centuries, guiding scientific research, and offering accordingly authority to the social and political and economic structures.

On November 22, 1914 Albert Einstein articulated the dynamics of gravitation of the universe, in the form of his field equations, by proposing: his general theory of 'relativity'.

To get a sense of what was happening we need to reflect on Einstein as he sat at his desk, stunned by what had appeared on the white paper.

To everyone alive at that time, his equation would appear to be just some letters and a few numbers scrawled onto the page. But to Einstein they revealed something unbelievable about the universe as a whole.

Even though by this time he must have grown somewhat accustomed to the regularity whereby shattering truths dropped from his fingertips, Einstein was stunned into bafflement by what he was seeing.

Through these symbols the universe 'whispered' that it was expanding in all directions. No one in three centuries of modern scientific work had imagined such a possibility. All his life Einstein had assumed the universe was an unchanging infinite space.

Now he was confronted with the idea that space was expanding in every direction.

This was not just a minor modification.

It was an idea that, if true, would shatter the world-view of everyone, including Einstein's own.

Newton, Herschel, Galileo, Kepler, Darwin, Curie, and all scientists of the modern period took the universe to be an unchanging macrocosm. The universe was perceived as a vast and fixed place, a celestial container that housed the stars and planets and everything else.

Then some strange symbols appeared, equations on the back of an envelope, mocking our former perspectives. It was in a language of a different geometry that contained a bizarre truth that scientists would be unraveling for centuries: namely, that the universe had erupted as a single ultimate 'density-of-being' fifteen billion years ago.

The universe 'had a birthplace', a center in space; the universe had an 'edge' to its existence, the beginning point of time.

Even Einstein rejected this truth. He lost his nerve, and altered the equations to hide their difficult truth.

In all this he was only too human, for how many of us are capable of accepting, all at once, the full truth, when it stabs you like a knife.

Einstein doctored his equations. He added a mathematical term now known as the 'cosmological constant'. By altering the equations he took away their secret story of expansion, and thereby preserved his attachment to an unchanging universe. It was only 'these altered equations' that he allowed out of his study. Perhaps he was confident no one would notice what he had left out.

But in Russia the mathematical cosmologist Alexander Friedmann, when pondering Einstein's equations, made a startling discovery. If one worked with these Einstein equations just a bit, dropping off this one strange term, ... wow, ... it turned out that Einstein's equations pointed to an expanding universe! Imagine Friedmann's excitement as he rushed to write a letter to Einstein to tell him of his discovery.

I only wish someone had snapped a photograph of Einstein's face when he unfolded the letter from this excited young mathematician.

Einstein thought he had put that business behind him, and now it was right back in his face. As it turned out, even Friedmann's work failed for Einstein to see his error.

But in the next decade Edwin Hubble in California trained his telescope on the distant galaxies and saw that they were in fact expanding away from us.

Finally, in the 1920s, Hubble invited Einstein down to Mount Palomar to see for himself, Einstein became convinced that the old idea of the universe as a fixed, unchanging macrocosm, the old idea that the universe was simply a giant box, was incorrect .

Only when Einstein saw with his own eyes the galaxies expanding away from us did he realize that 'his own original insight concerning a dynamic expanding universe' was in fact the truth.

The universe was expanding. The universe had an edge to its existence. The universe had a birthplace. All of these had been predicted by his original equations.

At the end of his life, when Einstein reflected on his journey, with its historic work at the highest level of genius through five decades of the twentieth century, he concluded that the doctoring of his field equations in order to escape their prediction of an expanding universe, represented 'the greatest blunder of my scientific career'.