Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!genrad!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!gwyn@brl-vld 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/VMBYou 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.