Do We Really Need a Cosmological Constant? :: essays research papers

In 1916, Albert Einstein made up his General Theory of Relativity without thinking of a cosmological constant. The view of that time was that the Universe had to be static. Yet, when he tried to model such an universe, he realized he cannot do it unless either he considers a negative pressure of matter (which is a totally unreasonable hypothesis) or he introduces a term (which he called cosmological constant), acting like a repulsive gravitational force. Some years later however, the Russian physicist Friedmann described a model of an expanding universe in which there was no need for a cosmological constant. The theory was immediately confirmed by Hubble's discovery of galaxies' red shift. Following from that, Hubble established the law that bears his name, according to which every two galaxies are receding from each other with a speed proportional to the distance between them. That is, mathematically: V=H D where H was named Hubble's constant. From this point on, the idea of a cosmological constant was for a time forgotten, and Einstein himself called its introduction "his greatest blunder", mostly because it was later demonstrated that a static Universe would be in an unstable equilibrium and would tend to be anisotropic. In most cosmological models that followed, the expansion showed in the Hubble's law simply reflected the energy remained from the Big Bang, the initial explosion that is supposed to have generated the Universe. It wasn't until relatively recently - 1960's or so, when more accurate astronomical and cosmological measurements could be made - that the constant began to reappear in theories, as a need to compensate the inconsistencies between the mathematical considerations and the experimental observations. I will discuss these discrepancies later. For now, I'll just say that this strange parameter, lambda- as Einstein called it, became again an important factor of the equations trying to describe our universe, a repulsive force to account not against a negative matter pressure, but for too small an expansion rate, as measured from Hubble's law or cosmic microwave background radiation experiments. I will show, in the next section, how all these cosmological parameters are linked together, and that it is sufficient to accurately determine only one of them for the others to be assigned a precise value. Unfortunately, there are many controversies on the values of such constants as the Hubble' cons tant - H, the age of the Universe t, its density , its curvature radius R, and our friend lambda.