Einstein’s Blunder

A lecture given as Visiting Professor of Cosmology at Gresham College, part of the series “The Frontiers of Knowledge”

When Albert Einstein tweaked his newly invented equations of General Relativity in 1917, he had one goal in mind: to find a solution that described a closed, static, eternal universe. He therefore minted a new universal constant to make it work. After Hubble’s discovery of the expansion of the universe in 1929, Einstein reportedly declared it his “greatest blunder”. In 1998 observations of distant exploding stars brought Einstein’s “blunder” back into consideration: Einstein might have been right the first time around.

A transcript of the lecture is available here.