• SkepticElliptic@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    I like how scientists couldn’t fathom that their math was wrong so they made up a story to cover for it and now they are in way over their heads.

    • niktemadur@kbin.social
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      2 years ago

      Echoes of Einstein and his Cosmological Constant, aka Lambda. “The biggest blunder of my life” he called it… then it turned out to be correct, although it’s now known as the Hubble Constant.

      • tate@lemmy.sdf.org
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        2 years ago

        The cosmological constant and Hubble constant are related, but not the same thing (I’m guessing that’s what you meant). Einstein felt there had to be something preventing the universe from collapsing. When he learned that the universe was expanding, he realized that it could just be momentum preventing the collapse, so lambda was a “mistake”.

        It was possible that the universe could be expanding, but with no dark energy. Then it would have a Hubble constant but no lambda