Vraag van een forumdeelnemer

I was just reading Krauss's article in Scientific American about the cosmological constant in general
relativity. He remarks that vacuum energy appears to be serving "exactly" as specified by the
cosmological term which Einstein inserted into the g-field equations.

Was the term invented largely ad-hoc, or was it custom tailored in some way peculiar to the
equations? If it is related in a non trivial way, then perhaps it's inclusion in the first place may
imply an intrinsic connection between general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Thoughts?

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Antwoord van andere forumdeelnemer

"He remarks that vacuum energy appears to be serving "exactly" as specified by the cosmological
term which Einstein inserted into the g-field equations."

That's been the biggest reason for the popularity of the cosmo constant since the 1960s or so. It
might have been much more thoroughly consigned to the trash heap if not for that connection.

"Was the term invented largely ad-hoc, or was it custom tailored in some way peculiar to the
equations?"

It's "ad hoc" but it's easy to see why you might need it even in Newtonian cosmology. If on some
large enough scale, the distribution of galaxies is indistinguishable from a uniform density dust
cloud filling all of space, then you get a net gravitational attraction
F = -G*M/r^2 = -G*rho*(4/3)*pi*r^3/r^2
or
F = -k*r,
a force directly proportional to distance from any (arbitrary) origin. If you want to cancel that out
and keep the universe static, then you need an opposing force of unknown origin
F' = +k'*r.
For Einstein, the critical problem was to keep the universe static so he needed k' exactly equal to k.
That was his big error. When it later turned out that the universe wasn't static, he junked the
whole force F'. It was probably a reasonable thing for him to do, but strictly that was also an error
since the additional force was fully consistent with the rest of physics and should not neceesarily
have been dropped. Also, if you try to derive the equations of general relativity by variational
principle or other techniques, a cosmological constant term almost invariably pops out along with
the G=8pi*T term (the generalization of the M/r^2 force), so many physicists have continued to
study it over the decades.

" If it is related in a non trivial way, then perhaps it's inclusion in the first place may imply an
intrinsic connection between general relativity and quantum mechanics."

I guess I would say that I think the connection is trivial. It's telling us more about consistent
equations for energy than anything else.