In recent decades the prejudice has become deeply rooted that “pure” science, especially theoretical physics is the product of abstract thought and mathematical deduction alone. As Eric Lerner points out, Einstein was partly responsible for this tendency. Unlike earlier theories, such as Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism, or Newton’s laws of gravity, which were firmly based on experiment, and soon confirmed by hundreds of thousands of independent observations, Einstein’s theories were initially confirmed on the basis of only two – the deflection of starlight by the sun’s gravitational field and a slight deviation in the orbit of Mercury.

The fact that relativity theory was subsequently shown to be correct has led others, possibly not quite up to Einstein’s level of genius, to assume that this is the way to proceed. Why bother with time-consuming experiments and tedious observations? Indeed, why depend upon the evidence of the senses at all, when we can get straight to the truth through the method of pure deduction?

We see a steadily increasing tendency towards a purely abstract theoretical approach to cosmology, based almost exclusively on mathematical calculations and relativity theory. “The annual number of cosmology papers published skyrocketed from sixty in 1965 to over five hundred in 1980, yet this growth was almost solely in purely theoretical work: by 1980 roughly 95 per cent of these papers were devoted to various mathematical models, such as the ‘Bianchi type XI universe’. By the mid-seventies, cosmologists’ confidence was such that they felt able to describe in intimate detail events of the first one-hundredth second of time, several billion years ago. Theory increasingly took on the characteristic of myth – absolute, exact knowledge about events in the distant past but an increasingly hazy understanding of how they led to the cosmos we now see, and an increasing rejection of observation.”

The Achilles’ heel of Einstein’s static, closed universe is that it would inevitably collapse in on itself because of the force of gravity. In order to get round this problem, he advanced the hypothesis of the “cosmological constant”, a repulsive force that would counteract that of gravity, thus preventing the universe from collapse. For a time the idea of a static universe, held forever in a state of equilibrium by the twin forces of gravity and the “cosmological constant” received support – at least from the very small number of scientists who claimed to understand the extremely abstract and complicated theories of Einstein.

In 1970, in an article in Science, Gerard de Vaucouleur showed that, as objects in the universe get larger, so their density gets less. An object ten times bigger, for example, will be 100 times less dense. This has serious implications for the attempts to establish the average density of the universe, which is necessary to obtain in order to establish whether there is enough gravity to halt the Hubble Expansion. If the average density drops with increases in size, it will be impossible to define the average density for the universe as a whole. If De Vaucouleur is right, the density of the observed universe will be far less than had been thought, and the value of omega could be as little as .0002. In a universe with so little matter, the effects of gravity will be so weak that the difference between general relativity and Newtonian gravity will be insignificant and, therefore, “for all practical purposes, general relativity, the foundation of conventional cosmology, can be ignored!” Lerner continues: “De Vaucouleur’s discovery shows that nowhere in the universe – except perhaps near a few ultradense neutron stars – is general relativity more than a subtle correction.”[63]

The difficulties involved in grasping what Einstein “really meant” are proverbial. When some journalist asked the English scientist Eddington, whose work gave the first direct confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, if it was true that there were only three people in the world who understood relativity, the latter replied, “Oh, really? And who is the third?” However, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann in the early 1920s showed that Einstein’s model of the universe was only one of an infinite number of possible cosmologies, some expanding, some contracting, depending on the value of the cosmological constant, and the “initial conditions” of the universe. This was a purely mathematical result, derived from Einstein’s equations. The real significance of Friedmann’s work was that it called into question the idea of a closed static universe, and showed that other models were possible.

  1. Lerner, E., op. cit., pp. 153-4, 221 and 222.