To derive his 1917 cosmological model, Einstein made three assumptions that lay outside the scope of his equations. The first was to suppose that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic in the large (i.e., the same everywhere on average at any instant in time), an assumption that the English astrophysicist Edward A. Milne later elevated to an entire philosophical outlook by naming it the cosmological principle. Given the success of the Copernican revolution, this outlook is a natural one.

The second assumption was to suppose that this homogeneous and isotropic universe had a closed spatial geometry. As described in the previous section, the total volume of a three-dimensional space with uniform positive curvature would be finite but possess no edges or boundaries (to be consistent with the first assumption).

The third assumption made by Einstein was that the universe as a whole is static--i.e., its large-scale properties do not vary with time. This assumption, made before Hubble's observational discovery of the expansion of the universe, was also natural; it was the simplest approach, as Aristotle had discovered, if one wishes to avoid a discussion of a creation event. Indeed, the philosophical attraction of the notion that the universe on average is not only homogeneous and isotropic in space but also constant in time was so appealing that a school of English cosmologists--Hermann Bondi, Fred Hoyle, and Thomas Gold--would call it the perfect cosmological principle and carry its implications in the 1950s to the ultimate refinement in the so-called steady state model.

To his great chagrin Einstein found in 1917 that with his three adopted assumptions, his equations of general relativity--as originally written down--had no meaningful solutions. To obtain a solution, Einstein realized that he had to add to his equations an extra term, which came to be called the cosmological constant. If one speaks in Newtonian terms, the cosmological constant could be interpreted as a repulsive force of unknown origin that could exactly balance the attraction of gravitation of all the matter in Einstein's closed universe and keep it from moving. The inclusion of such a term in a more general context, however, meant that the universe in the absence of any mass-energy (i.e., consisting of a vacuum) would not have a space-time structure that was flat (i.e., would not have satisfied the dictates of special relativity exactly). Einstein was prepared to make such a sacrifice only very reluctantly, and, when he later learned of Hubble's discovery of the expansion of the universe and realized that he could have predicted it had he only had more faith in the original form of his equations, he regretted the introduction of the cosmological constant as the "biggest blunder" of his life. Ironically, recent theoretical developments in particle physics suggest that in the early universe there may very well have been a nonzero value to the cosmological constant and that this value may be intimately connected with

Excerpt from the Encyclopedia Britannica without permission.