Abstract

Whenever a difficulty has been encountered with our theory of cosmology, it has always been resolved either by simply accepting it as an unexpected implication of the theory or by modifying the theory to accommodate the difficulty. For example, in the past decade or so evidence has accumulated that the universe seemingly is expanding at an accelerating rate. This discovery was unexpected and surprising. But it was accepted by the mainstream of cosmological physicists without a whole lot of debate. It was little questioned that there might be a problem with our model of the shape of the universe, which requires the actual data we obtained, the actual measurements we made, to be interpreted as an acceleration. Then, to explain the acceleration, Einstein's Theory of General Relativity was patched by re-introducing the ?cosmological constant?. The cosmological constant was an idea of Einstein's that he ultimately rejected as, he said, ?the greatest blunder of my career?.