Sunday 2 December 2012

Did Einstein discover dark energy?


One of the more interesting things that popped up on arXiv this week was the quirkily titled abstract, How Einstein Discovered Dark Energy, submitted by Alex Harvey, Visiting Scholar at New York University on 22 November.

It bears repeating in its entirety:

"In 1917 Einstein published his Cosmological Considerations Concerning the General Theory of Relativity. In it was the first use of the cosmological constant. Shortly thereafter Schrodinger presented a note providing a solution to these same equations with the cosmological constant term transposed to the right hand side thus making it part of the stress-energy tensor. Einstein commented that if Schrodinger had something more than a mere mathematical convenience in mind he should describe its properties. Then Einstein detailed what some of these properties might be. In so doing, he gave the first description of Dark Energy. We present a translation of Schrodinger's paper and Einstein's response."
The full paper and references are downloadable here.


It will be interesting to hear what the responses are to this.

Source: http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.6338

1 comment:

  1. In an accelerated rocket, the dimensions of space towards movement due to ‘Lorentz Contraction’ are on continuous reduction.

    Using the equivalence principle, we presume that in the gravitational field, the same thing would happen.

    In this implicates in ‘dark energy effect’. The calculi show that in a 7%-contraction for each billion years would explain our observation of galaxies in accelerated separation.





    Lorentz Contraction



    If we suppose that gravitational field contracts the space around it (including everything within), we can explain the accelerated separation from galaxy through this contraction without postulating ‘dark energy’.

    The contraction of space made by gravity would cause a kind of ‘illusion of optic’, seem like, as presented below, that galaxies depart fastly.



    The contraction of space would be equivalent to relativistic effect which occurs in a special nave in high-speed L.M.: With regard to an observer in an inertial referential stopped compared to a nave, the observer and everything is on it, including own nave, has its dimension contracted towards to movement of nave compared to a stopped observer (Lorentz Contraction).

    This means that the ‘rule’ (measuring instruments) within the nave is smaller than the observer outside of moving nave.

    The consequence is, with this ‘reduced rule’, this moving observer would measure things bigger than the observer would measure out of nave.





    An accelerated rocket and its continuous contraction



    In the same way, if we think of an accelerated increasing speed rocket, its length towards movement – compared to an inertial reference - will be smaller, and 'rule' within the nave will decrease continuously compared to this observer.







    I.e., the gravitational field would make that all rules within this field would be continuously smaller regarded to an observer outside of gravitational field and this would make, as we can see, these observers see things out of field be away fastly.



    Anyway, even if “equivalence principle” can’t be applied into a gravitational field to show that the space is contracting around it, we can take it as a new effect on gravitational fields and this would explain the 'dark energy effect'.



    The “dark energy” through gravitational contraction:



    Let’s think what would happen if a light emitted by a star from a distant galaxy would arrive into our planet:



    Our galaxy, as well as distant galaxies, would be in continuous contraction, as seen before, due to gravity.

    A photon emitted by a star from this distant galaxy, after living its galaxy, would go through by an “empty” big space, without so much gravitational influence, until finally arrives into our galaxy and, lastly, to our planet.



    During this long coursed way (sometimes billion years), this photon would suffer few gravitational effect and its wavelength would be little affected.

    However, during this period, our system (our rules) would still decreasing due to gravitational field, and when this photon finally arrives here, we would measure its wavelength with a reduced ‘rule’ compared to what we had had at the moment when this photon was emitted from galaxy.



    So, in our measurement would verify if this photon had suffered Redshift because, with reduced rule, we would measure a wavelength longer than those was measured. The traditional explanation is “Shift for Red” happened due to Doppler Effect compared to galaxy separation speed!





    End of Dark Energy



    Farthest a galaxy is from viewpoint, more time this light will take to arrive us and more shrunken our ‘rule’ will be to measure this photon since it had been emitted; so it would be bigger than wavelength, which would induce us to think of faster galaxy separation speed.

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