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[coldcreation]

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It is entertaining to contemplate what course cosmology and general relativity would have taken had Einstein not abolished the cosmological term, and sat back to await corroboration by observations. Einstein would have had to wait until 1998 for the official confirmation of his discovery.

Perhaps he would have said something like: “If the cosmological term exists, then away with the expanding universe.”

Yet, certainly when seen in terms of the fundamental antithesis between the modernism of early general relativity and the reintroduction of lambda into contemporary cosmology, it was not so much the grandeur of such a theme contained in Einstein’s equations that carried weight; more directly and deeply significant was the relationship between lambda and the concept of a static universe embodied in the general theory, both as image and act.

The Supernovae Ia fireworks festivities backfired on the crowd, leaving several victims, including at least three fatalities: The Friedmann triptychs unfortunately did not make it. Perhaps the most striking of the casualties now listed in critical condition: the inflationary expansion model and all the more recent analogues that predicted a flat universe.

Today, in the face of contradictory evidence, cosmologists have resurrected a fragment from the debris of relativity and have found for it a new identity and have affirmed thus its ‘material’ qualities. (One mans trash is another man treasure; so the saying goes). Recent interpretations of observational data have tilted the balance in favor of a new-nonzero-cosmological constant, dubbed dark energy.

In the eyes of the beholder, a cosmological constant-dominated universe expands endlessly and is literally driven by a motor-like force: with the same name that Einstein attributed to the term in his equations designed to mediate equilibrium and stability of the universe.



CC