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Einstein's Biggest Blunder

Episode 19 of 30

Astronomer Heather Couper looks at the discovery that the universe is expanding. How did it impact upon Einstein's theories? From June 2008.

Heather Couper presents a narrative history of astronomy.

In 1915, Albert Einstein found that he had to introduce a new factor into his equations of gravity to prevent the stars from falling in on one another. He called it the cosmological constant. But then, astronomers discovered that the light from galaxies was stretched in a way that could only be explained if the galaxies were flying apart from each other and the universe was expanding.

A recent twist to this tale came in the year 2000, when estimates of the rate of the expansion revealed that the most distant galaxies are accelerating. The only way to explain this was by a force called dark energy - in effect, a cosmological constant.

Readers are Timothy West, Robin Sebastian, Julian Rhind-Tutt and John Palmer.

15 minutes

Last on

Fri 24 Nov 2017 02:15

Broadcasts

  • Thu 19 Jun 2008 15:45
  • Mon 27 May 2013 14:15
  • Thu 19 Feb 2015 14:15
  • Fri 20 Feb 2015 00:15
  • Thu 23 Nov 2017 14:15
  • Fri 24 Nov 2017 02:15