The True Story of Modern Cosmology by Emilio Elizalde

Author:Emilio Elizalde
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030806545
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The “Fifth International Solvay Conference on Electrons and Photons,” which took place in Brussels in October 1927, became extraordinarily famous over time. It is probably the highest-level scientific conference ever held: 17 of the 29 participants appearing in the much-famous photograph of it had won, or would later win, the Nobel Prize (Madame Curie did so twice). Lemaître was there, and during a break from the sessions, he cornered Einstein to deliver his recently published article and his conclusions. He took the opportunity to tell Einstein face to face that he had discovered a solution to his field equations of relativity which would correspond to an expanding universe; and that it perfectly fit with the latest astronomical observations. He added, furthermore, that he had managed to demonstrate that the static solution of the Universe that Einstein had obtained was, in fact, unstable. Ultimately, the Universe could not be static; it had to be expanding! After examining Lemaître's work, the answer that Einstein gave him was the following: he had not found any error in the mathematical formulas, but the physical interpretation of them, the idea that the Universe was expanding, did not make the slightest sense—it was abominable, as Lemaître himself later detailed in French. Looking at the equations, Einstein had recalled that Alexander Friedmann had been the first to suggest such an unrealistic possibility five years earlier. What made things worse now was that he did not want to pay any attention to the clear evidence that Lemaître showed him, based on the results of astronomical observations. Though, let me repeat, these observations still had to be interpreted correctly, which was rarely the case at the time.

At this point, the reader should pause for a moment to reflect seriously on this surprising fact. To Einstein, a genius, the creator of general relativity, the master of space and time, of its contractions and dilations, the discoverer of the possible existence of entities as esoteric as gravitational lenses and gravitational waves, it took him another four years (until 1931) to become convinced that the Universe was indeed expanding. How to understand such an attitude, so much stubbornness? It must seem strange to us now, even incredible. Rather, his attitude clearly illustrates a couple of issues. To begin with, it supports the conviction of the author of this book that the expansion of space was, at that time, an extremely revolutionary idea, which no one accepted for years and that many (like Hubble himself) would never understand! Lemaître was for a certain time the only man on Earth who was comfortable with the idea that physical space was in fact expanding. Another question that we could consider now is this: to what extent was he just lucky to find the correct interpretation of the astronomical results, based on Einstein’s fundamental theory of gravity? Whatever the situation, it was terribly difficult for him to convince other colleagues of the important discovery he had made.

Almost all historians attribute this, probably copying each other again,

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