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From: gwyn%brl-vld@sri-unix.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.physics
Subject: Re:  The General Theory of Relativity and Cosmology
Message-ID: <2060@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 12-Jun-83 13:08:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.2060
Posted: Sun Jun 12 13:08:05 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 14-Jun-83 03:47:46 EDT
Lines: 51

From:      Doug Gwyn VLD/VMB 

You state the popular view of cosmology based on 1915 general relativity.
There are some not-so-well known problems that are seldom considered but
are nonetheless relevant:

Nobody has demonstrated that distant galaxies recede from us at a rate
proportional to their distance from us.  What HAS been shown is that
their light is red-shifted proportionally the farther away they are.
This is not at all the same thing, as light can be red-shifted for
reasons other than Doppler effect.  Indeed, long ago E. Milne came up
with a cosmology that obeyed the "perfect cosmological principle"
(that globally things are similar everywhere and everywhen), used
special relativity only, and had light red-shifted in spite of the
steady state.  Any relativistic steady-state cosmology is likely to
have the same feature.

Here is the story of the "cosmological constant".  As you state, it
was introduced __ad ___hoc by Einstein in the early years of general
relativity because he felt a closed universe was necessary and
couldn't figure out one with the original field laws.  After
Friedmann was able to come up with closed cosmological models
consistent with the original equations, Einstein withdrew the
"cosmological constant" term (effectively setting the constant back
to zero) and admitted HIS PROCEDURE had been a great blunder.

Einstein never considered his general theory complete, and he
spent the rest of his life investigating ways to complete it.
Most of this work on a unified field theory was spent on generalizing
the theory of general relativity, principally through considering
generalizations of differential geometry (connections on fiber
bundles, etc.).  Einstein never again introduced an __ad ___hoc constant
into his work.

By 1950 Schr"odinger had completed his program to investigate all
possibilities for a unified field theory along Einstein's general
lines and made the remarkable discovery that the simplest, most
natural generalization of general relativity AUTOMATICALLY produced
equations that generalized the original field laws WITH cosmological
term!  The cosmological constant appeared spontaneously as a
definitely non-zero quantity in this development.  Those of you
who received copies of my Master's thesis can follow this theory
therein.

Recent fads such as "black holes" and "big bang" cosmology are usually
based on extending 1915 general relativity into domains where it was
clear to earlier workers such as Einstein and Schrodinger that the
approximations of the theory were no longer valid.  A correct treatment
of such matters would require a different theory, perhaps Schr"odinger's
and perhaps something rather different like one of the modern
supersymmetry theories.