Einstein's Greatest Mistake by David Bodanis

Author:David Bodanis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

THIRTEEN

The Queen of Hearts Is Black

EINSTEIN WAS IN A HAZE of confusion after the fall of 1923. He’d been thrown by Friedmann’s unexpected paper suggesting that the original ideas in the raw G=T equation were right and the curvature of the entire universe could be changing. Clusters of stars and planets might end up sliding away from one another in what would become an infinite expansion. Or the opposite might occur, and the curvature might be flexing differently so that the ancient Hindu mythologies might prove to be true after all, and the entire universe was doomed to an endless cycle of contraction and expansion, as if we were somehow locked within an invisible sphere that deflated and inflated forever.

Einstein had managed to push aside some of this haze, at least from his conscious mind, by pretending that what Friedmann had found was merely a mathematical possibility, of no real physical significance. But then, four years after Friedmann’s abortive visit to Berlin, and five years after Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s coworker made it to the mountains of Arequipa, that temporary reprieve ended.

In 1927 Einstein was at a sequel to the Brussels conference he had first attended as a young man living in Prague. He was a hero now and had set aside any lingering concerns about his gravitational equation—or at least had tried to—so as to focus on other undertakings. Yet on one of the first days of the conference, an earnest, heavyset Belgian man in his thirties came up to him and said that he had a mathematical proof that the universe was expanding.

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