It is quite easy to include a weight for empty space in the equations of gravity. Einstein did so in 1917, introducing what came to be known as the c… - Frank Wilczek
" "It is quite easy to include a weight for empty space in the equations of gravity. Einstein did so in 1917, introducing what came to be known as the cosmological constant into his equations. His motivation was to construct a static model of the universe. To achieve this, he had to introduce a negative mass density for empty space, which just canceled the average positive density due to matter. With zero total density, gravitational forces can be in static equilibrium. Hubble's subsequent discovery of the expansion of the universe, of course, made Einstein's static model universe obsolete. ...The fact is that to this day we do not understand in a deep way why the vacuum doesn't weigh, or (to say the same thing in another way) why the cosmological constant vanishes, or (to say it in yet another way) why Einstein's greatest blunder was a mistake.
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About Frank Wilczek
Frank Anthony Wilczek (born May 15, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician and Nobel laureate. He is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Founding Director of T. D. Lee Institute and Chief Scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), distinguished professor at Arizona State University (ASU) and full professor at Stockholm University. Wilczek, along with David Gross and H. David Politzer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction". In May 2022, he was awarded the Templeton Prize for his "investigations into the fundamental laws of nature, that has transformed our understanding of the forces that govern our universe and revealed an inspiring vision of a world that embodies mathematical beauty."
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Frank Anthony Wilczek
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Frank A. Wilczek
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Frank A Wilczek
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Additional quotes by Frank Wilczek
Sam Treiman... has quoted something he called Treiman's theorem... Impossible things usually don't happen. ...With the discovery of radioactivity... it suddenly became apparent that the "impossible" was happening all the time. Uranium, thorium, radium... fit all the requirements of chemical elements. They could not be broken down by any of the standard methods... But occasionally... atoms of these elements spontaneously changed into other kinds of atoms. ...So what is left of the doctrine of the elements? Is alchemy reinstated? Not at all. The point is that the doctrine fails only under rare or special conditions. ...We can isolate the conditions in which they do, and retain a more restricted but still useful concept of the "impossible."
Particles that, like <sup>4</sup>He, show constructive interference are said to be bosons—a shorthand term for "particles obeying Bose–Einstein statistics." …One way to recognize bosons is their tendency to imitate one each other. ...the presence of one boson increases the chance that another of its identical siblings will also appear in the same spot. There's an attraction between them. We will speak ...of an attractive identity force drawing together identical bosons. Lasers are a spectacular example...
The result will be points of quiescence—technically known as nodes—where the air's density varies not at all, and no sound is heard. Note the paradox here: either sphere alone creates a sound wave at this point; two spheres together add up to no sound there at all. Two sources can add up to give less than one. This is the essence of destructive interference. (When two sources are giving the same instruction, the resulting vibration bears not twice but four times the energy. This phenomenon, oxymoronically known as constructive interference, may seem puzzling.)
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