In 1916, Albert Einstein published his foundational paper on the General Theory of Relativity in the German-language science journal Annalen der Physik. Now, 110 years later, scientists are still debating just how right Einstein’s conception of the universe really was, especially as it relates to the accelerated expansion of the universe. Of course, at the time of his revolutionary publication, the world still didn’t know that the universe was expanding, so a year later, Einstein introduced a “lambda” cosmological constant to his equations to form a stable, non-collapsing universe.
Thanks to the pioneering work of Edwin Hubble in 1929, the world learned that the universe was actually expanding, and in response Einstein discarded lambda, calling it his “greatest blunder.” What Einstein couldn’t have known was that, decades after his death, lambda would make a comeback. When astronomers discovered in the late 1990s that the universe’s expansion was speeding up, the constant became central to the modern model of the cosmos, known as “Lambda-Cold Dark Matter,” or ΛCDM. Rising along with the renaissance of the cosmological constant was a concept known as dark energy, the force that made this accelerated expansion possible.
This ΛCDM is a pretty tidy description of the universe with one glaring plot hole—we’ve never directly seen or measured dark energy. Because of this lack of evidence, some scientists have searched for other possible explanations, even disregarding Einstein entirely, but a new study by researchers at the University of California, Davis takes the opposite approach. According to their research, published earlier this year in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A, Einstein was actually more right than he ever knew.
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