Einstein’s Self-Professed Greatest Blunder and the Existence of God
Part I – The Blunder
Around 1905, as Einstein completed his relativity equations, he could see they predicted that the universe was expanding. But because at that time everyone believed that the universe was eternal and stable, and there was no physical evidence of expansion, he added another term to eliminate the prediction. That term came to be called the Cosmological Constant.
Unfortunately for Einstein, over the next 25 years that was about to change forever.
In relatively short order, astronomers discovered other galaxies where they had thought that the Milky Way galaxy itself was the universe. They determined that these galaxies were ALL moving away from us and at fantastic speeds – some at 2-3,000 miles per second. And they discovered that the further away they were, the faster they were moving. This was very puzzling.
The solution required a new conception of the universe, known today as the Big Bang: that the universe began at a single point in a tremendous outpouring of energy which was the beginning of time and space. Today we understand that the resultant galaxies are not racing THROUGH space, but that the space between galaxies is itself expanding. That’s why EVERY galaxy we observe appears to be moving away from us. This rate of expansion is known as the Hubble Constant.
[Geek Alert: For those of you interested, the value of the Hubble Constant, known as Ho, is currently calculated as 70.6 +/- 3.1 (km/sec)/Mpc. Mpc is a megaparsec or 3.3 million light years. So for every 3.3 millions light years separating two galaxies, they recede from each other at approximately 70 km/sec.]
This expansion and “moving away” is perhaps best visualized as a loaf of raisin bread dough. When it rises, each raisin moves away from every other raisin – and the more dough between them at the start, the “faster” they appear to move. But as we know, the raisins aren’t going anywhere! That’s very much like what’s happening with the universe. The space between galaxies is expanding which gives the appearance of movement and makes everything appear to be receding from us.
When Einstein became convinced of this, he described the addition of the Cosmological Constant to his equations as his “greatest blunder.”
So just what does this have to do with the existence of God? Well, you have to know “the rest of the story.”