Universe: Static

Universe: Static

Published: January 13, 2008, 12:00 am
Updated: April 21, 2009, 9:27 pm
Lead Author: Sten Odenwald
Topics: Cosmology

Introduction

No sooner had he published his general theory of relativity in 1915, but Albert Einstein turned his attention to solving his newly-minted, relativistic equation for gravity for some simple physical systems. One of these was the universe itself, which he approximated as a uniform distribution of matter spread out through space. The solution showed that such a universe must either collapse or expand, and not liking such non-static possibilities, he added a new term to his equation called the cosmological constant. It would serve as an anti-gravity effect that could be tuned to exactly cancel the global tendency for the universe to expand or contract, rendering it a static, eternal, and unmoving universe. Although the geometry of this spacetime was closed and finite, it was perpetually balanced between expansion and collapse for all eternity. Einstein said of his intuitive view of the static universe,

I have...again perpetrated something about gravitation theory which somewhat exposes me to the danger of being confined in a madhouse.

By 1917, the universe consisted of the stars in the Milky Way. There was as yet no hard evidence that even our nearest galactic sister, the Andromeda galaxy, was external to the Milky Way, and no astronomers had observed any grand motions of the siderial universe. The universe looked to be static, so this was the assumption that Einstein decided to build into his first model of the cosmos using his relativistic equation for gravity as a starting point. Einstein was forced to add a "cosmological constant" term to his equations to end up with a static universe. Willhelm deSitter used Einstein's general relativity to describe an utterly empty universe in which only the cosmological constant existed. The universe expanded eternally at an exponential rate. By 1930, Sir Arthur Eddington had proved that the static Einstein universe was dynamically unstable against small changes in its radius, sending it into uncontrolled expansion. One year later, Einstein acknowledged his cosmological constant as a blunder, and so the theoretical underpinnings behind a static, eternal universe vanished.

In 1993, David Crawford at the University of Sidney proposed a new, static universe model based on Newtonian physics, but with a new term added to Newton's equation for the gravitational force. This term arises from the presumed embedding of our 3-dimensional space in a larger 4-dimensional space and acts like a centrifugal force. The effect is to stabilize the Newtonian universe against gravitational collapse thereby making the universe eternal and static. Because of the interaction between photons in our universe with this higher dimensional centrifugal force, as photons travel through intergalactic space, they loose energy enroute, resulting in a Hubble Law-like redshift/distance relation. This theory, however, implies that the current formulation of general relativity and Einstein's field equation for gravity are incorrect because in the limit of weak gravitational fields, Einstein's equation does not yield the additional centrifugal force term. Crawford's theory also does not account for the isotropy of the cosmic background radiation, or the universality of the primordial element abundances.

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External Links

Preview Image

"The Milky Way in Infrared" - (Source: The COBE Project, DIRBE, NASA.)

Citation

Odenwald, Sten (Contributing Author); Bernard Haisch (Topic Editor). 2008. "Universe: Static." In: Encyclopedia of the Cosmos. Eds. Bernard Haisch and Joakim F. Lindblom (Redwood City, CA: Digital Universe Foundation). [First published January 13, 2008; Last revised April 29, 2008; Retrieved April 12, 2009]. <http://www.eofcosmos.org/article/Universe:_Static>

 

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