Einstein Confesses his "Biggest Blunder"

In 1917 Albert Einstein began to explore the cosmological implications of his recently published general theory of relativiy. General relativity is a theory of gravitation, the only force acting between stars and galaxies, so it stood to reason that it should have something to say about the structure of the universe.

Einstein wrote his equations, gave them a nudge and watched them soar. To his astonishment, they revealed that under general relativity the universe could not be static, but must be either expanding or contracting. There was, at the time, no observational evidence for this, and Einstein was forced to conclude, much to his chagrin, that there must be something wrong with the theory. He did not discard it. Instead, he modified the equations adding an artificial term containing what he called the “cosmological constant.” The cosmological constant, he thought, would hold the universe in check.

He was wrong. The Russian mathematician Aleksandr Friedmann found that Einstein had made an algebraic error, upon correction of which the universe happily took wing again. Einstein was puzzled. The equations of general relativity were simple and elegant. They had the kind of mathematical beauty in which the insightful physicist discerns physical thruth even before the equations are tested experimentally. But the astronomers he consulted told him that the stars wander more or less randomly through space, showing no concerted motion. Nature, it appeared to Einstein, had spoken, and against nature´s last word no physicist in his right mind --least of all Einstein-- ought to rise.

At the time many astronomers still believed that the stars in the Milky Way galaxy were more or less the whole universe. The spiral nebulae had not yet been recognized as galaxies in their own right. Many scientists thought they were solar systems in the process of formation, so when the astronomer Vesto Slipher of Lowell Observatory discovered that several spiral nebulae seemed to be receding from the earth at speeds much greater than the typical velocities of stars, nobody knew what to make of his data. He had in fact found the first observational indication that the universe is expanding.

But Slipher did not know that his spiral nebulae were faraway galaxies. Only after Edwin Hubble discovered Cepheid variable stars in the spiral nebulae were they identified as such. Moreover, the presence of Cepheid variables in the spirals allowed astronomers to determine their distances. In 1929 Hubble plotted the distances of 25 galaxies against their velocities of recession from the earth as measured by the “redshift” in their spectra. If the velocities were random, if the observation that most spirals seemed to be receding from the earth were just a coincidence, the graph would show a swarm of points scattered every which way. Instead, Hubble found a straight line.

Hubble was no theorist, and he was completely innocent of general relativity. He was wary of this “redshift-distance relation,” as he cautiously called it, and did not draw conlcusions from his discovery. But his graph was a message in the handwriting of the powers that be. To all who had eyes it read: “Behold, the universe is expanding.”

Einstein later called the cosmological constant his "biggest blunder". However, watch this for later developments in the fate of  this strange antigravity force:

Einstein and God

Albert Einstein was a deeply religious man. But, like Baruch Spinoza before him, he understood religion in a very idiosyncratic way. A Jew by birth, he very early abandoned traditional religious views.
On April 24, 1929, Einstein, who by then was the most famous scientist ever, received a simple cablegram from Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of the Institutional Synagogue, New York: “Do you believe in God?” Einstein replied: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”
Einstein’s major utterances on the subject of religion came in the form of two essays with mirror-image titles --”Religion and Science,” written for the New York Times on the occasion of his second visit to the United States in 1931, and “Science and Religion,” written eight years later. In the first of these Einstein outlines three states of religious development --the religion of fear that moved primitive peoples, the subsequent moral religion whose driving force is social feeling, and finally, the “cosmic religious sense...which recognizes neither dogmas nor God made in man’s image.”
People tend to equate “religion” with their particular system of belief. In his second essay Einstein was far more ecumenical. To him religion stems from the legitimate need to find a goal for our human aspirations. The purely rational --or scientific-- conception of existence cannot provide an ethics to guide human endeavor; it cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends.
"To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions..."
At a loss to describe succintly what religion is, Einstein is content to ask what characterizes a religious person.
"A person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has...liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings, and aspirations to which he clings because of their super-personal value. It seems to me that what is important is the force of this super-personal content and the depth of the conviction concerning its overpowering meaningfulness, regardless of whether any attempt is made to unite this content with a divine Being."
Einstein describes as religious the scientist’s trust in the rational nature of reality. But one must not confuse the religious with the supernatural. “The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events,” he writes, “the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature.”
The awe that deep scientific understanding brings is very close to a religious epiphany and stems from the same underlying psychological foundation.
"Whoever has undergone the intense experience of [scientific understanding] is moved by profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence. By way of the understanding he achieves a far reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind towards the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence... . This attitude...appears to me to be religious in the highest sense of the word."
I wrote this entry in response to an e-mail from my good friend Dimitri Maekawa, who is experiencing an Einsteinian epiphany in Victoria, British Columbia. May he find solace in communion with such a one as uncle Albert.