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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Why is light bent whent it passes a massive body in the space?
« on: 15/02/2021 06:10:56 »A couple of points. Einstein tended to approach things a bit differently that other theorists. While they would start from the experimental evidence and work back to a theory to explain it, he tended to start from basic concepts and assumptions, follow them to their logical conclusion and see if it matched the evidence. Pretty much the opposite of "fudging".
I don't think the mathematical model was "lucky" or "fudged" - it just followed the evidence
- The part where Einstein did find out he had fudged the result was in picking a value for the cosmological constant to fit in with the common view at the time (stretching all the way back to Newton, and probably to Greek philosophers) that the universe as a whole (outside the Earth & Planets) was static and unchanging.
The other thing to consider with his cosmological constant was that, at the time, he developed GR, it still had not been established that the universe extended past the Milky way. So not only did he not know of the expansion, but he was considering a much smaller "universe".
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