Einstein's Repulsive Idea

He invented antigravity in desperation and abandoned it first chance he got--but it may be the most powerful force in the universe

Albert Einstein never did like the idea of antigravity. It wasn't that he had a problem with farfetched notions. After all, his special and general relativity theories made the astonishing assertion that time, space and matter could be squeezed and stretched like so much India rubber. The trouble was that some sort of antigravity force--Einstein called it the "cosmological term"--was required to make the predictions of general relativity match what astronomers believed the actual universe looked like. And that extra term marred the mathematical elegance of his beloved equations. The great physicist was hugely relieved when the discovery of the expanding...

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