Claudia de Rham, Raphael Bousso, and Bjørn Ekeberg discuss the biggest mistake Einstein made, and why it's still relevant now.
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New scientific accounts of the universe are expected to fit with observation and predicted results from established theories. But at the heart of modern physics, there's reason to think this is not the case. The century-old crisis begins with Einstein’s self-proclaimed 'biggest blunder': on account of the discovery of an expanding, not static, universe, he threw out ‘the cosmological constant’ from his original equations of general relativity. But when the constant resurfaced in the ‘70s, associated with the energy of the vacuum, there was a problem: The Standard Model of particle physics predicted a value that was 120 orders of magnitude out. That’s worse than predicting an atom is the size of the universe. Unsurprisingly, it has been described as the 'worst prediction in the history of physics'. Worse still, the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and the mysterious ‘dark energy’, invented to account for this, only muddied the waters. Despite the prediction error, the majority of physicists use the vacuum energy as an explanation for dark energy and accept the Standard Model as a credible theory.
Is there something necessarily wrong with dark energy and our current cosmological story? Or can we fix the problem and find the right answer, or is science a limited model and not a direct description of reality at all?
It is worth clarifying three concepts relevant to the debate, often all used interchangeably. The first, the cosmological constant, is a term Einstein added to his equations of general relativity (the theory of how matter warps spacetime) to allow for a static universe, neither expanding or contracting (though it turns out we live in an expanding universe). The vacuum energy is the energy of empty space. According to quantum field theory, which combines quantum mechanics and special relativity to describe the behaviour of elementary particles, even empty space has some energy. The vacuum energy is a physical quantity predicted by the theory. Dark energy is the unknown cause of the observed acceleration of the expansion of the universe. Whether each are distinct or the same is undecided.
#physics #einstein #relativity #gravity #darkenergy
Claudia de Rham is a theoretical physicist based at Imperial College London, who works on cutting-edge research at the interface of gravity, cosmology, and particle physics. In 2020, she won the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists for revitalizing the theory of massive gravity.
Raphael Bousso is Professor and The Chancellor's Chair in Physics at UC Berkeley, where he researches theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity. He was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society "for fundamental discoveries in the field of quantum cosmology."
Bjørn Ekeberg is a philosopher of science whose work focuses on the limits of scientific knowledge, challenging the standard model of cosmology by probing some of the biggest inconsistencies and mysteries in science today.
Jacob Barandes hosts.
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00:00 Introduction
00:22 Is something fundamentally wrong with our scientific theories?
00:34 Claudia de Rham: No, they are still valid
04:08 Bjørn Ekeberg: Dark energy is an invention
06:49 Raphael Bousso: Science needs mistakes
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