At 17.45 GMT today, I carried out the final fuel checks on our Einstein paper, took a deep breath and hit launch (okay SUBMIT).
Over the summer, I came across quite a few references to a paper Einstein wrote on cosmology in early 1931, in the wake of Hubble’s first observations of the expanding universe (Ahem – perhaps you mean in the wake of Hubble’s observation of an apparent linear relation between the recession of the spiral nebulae and their distance, an empirical result that some theorists interpreted as evidence of an expanding universe – Ed ).
Like many Einstein papers, this paper is written in German, but unlike most Einstein papers I could not find an English translation anywhere – pretty strange, given that this is Einstein’s first official publication in the light of the new astronomical results (and given that he wrote very few papers on cosmology). So, with permission from the Einstein Archives, I spent the summer translating the paper with a colleague and adding hysterical remarks. Sorry, historical remarks. It was a most enjoyable project, with a few surprises along the way:
(i) Einstein’s 1931 paper offers a lot of interesting insights into his thoughts on the first tentative evidence for an expanding universe, but it does not say what a lot of science historians seem to think it says
(ii) Some calculations, where Einstein estimates values for the radius of the universe and the density of matter using Hubble’s results, seem to contain a fairly obvious numerical error
(iii) The same error can be seen in writing on a blackboard preserved from a lecture Einstein gave on the paper at Oxford University in 1931
Einstein in Oxford – nice to know we all make mistakes
There has already been quite a bit of interest in our article, it seems your humble correspondent may have gotten lucky for once. Or we might be wrong, in which case we’re going to look very silly. In the meantime, it looks like I’ll be doing a bit of traveling this year….
Update (Jan 2014)
Our article has now been published in the European Physical Journal (History). You can find the article here or a preprint on the Physics Arxiv here.
Update (Jan 2014)
Our article made the cover of EPJ!
Antimatter 