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Originally Posted by Disinfo Agent
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Originally Posted by Sam5
Yes. An understanding of gravity and visual evidence of a lot of mass in stars. He figured the stars had to be doing something other than just sitting still in space.
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Then why did Einstein still think the universe was static, over a hundred years later -- because he was an atheist?  |
I think he thought so because spectrography was still fairly new in 1915-17, and many astronomers were still reporting a fairly “static” universe in which the stars seemed to be “fixed”, except for some small motions that were not much faster than the speed of the earth around the sun. I’ve actually researched this. I think he was misled by the lack of spectrographic evidence of rapid star and galaxy motion. One problem that slowed down that progress was the insensitivity of old film and glass plates. So, the expert spectrographers could not get good spectrographic pictures of distant galaxies and their high redshifts until some years later. Hubble had the advantage in the 1920s of a larger telescope (100 inches, I think), plus much more sensitive glass plates. Einstein, being somewhat youthful and very precocious, didn’t want to wait 50 years until more was known before he started suggesting ideas about the universe.
Einstein wasn’t quite an “atheist”, thus his remark about the “dice”.