The Man Who Corrected Einstein

This video is about how Russian physicist Aleksandr Fridman corrected Albert Einstein about the expansion of the universe. Einstein thought that general relativity implied that space had to be static and unchanging, but he had made a technical error regarding the differentiation of the metric (in particular, I believe he mistook the determinant of the metric for a scalar rather than a tensor density of weight 2). Friedmann didn't make this differential geometric mistake, and the cosmologies he found from the Einstein Equations were more varied in their properties - they could be expanding, or contracting, or (with the cosmological constant), static.

REFERENCES

Alexander Friedmann
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Friedmann

Einstein Wrongly Criticizes Alexander Friedmann
https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol13-trans/301

Alexander Friedmann Corrects Einstein
https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol13-trans/363

Einstein Admits his Mathematical Mistake
https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol14-trans/77

Interrogating the Legend of Einstein’s “Biggest Blunder”
https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.06768

Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity
https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol6-trans/433

On the General Theory of Relativity (Einstein)
https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol6-trans/110

The Field Equations of Gravitation
https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol6-trans/129

The Einstein Field Equations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_field_equations

Presentation about the Sequence of Events
http://web.mit.edu/8.286/www/slides07/Einstein-and-Friedmann.pdf

Tensor Densities:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_density

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Created by Henry Reich