The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the discovery of cosmic acceleration due to dark energy, a discovery that is all the more perplexing as nobody knows what dark energy actually is. We put the modern concept of cosmological vacuum energy into historical context and show how it grew out of disparate roots in quantum mechanics (zero-point energy) and relativity theory (the cosmological constant, Einstein's “greatest blunder”). These two influences have remained strangely aloof and still co-exist in an uneasy alliance that is at the heart of the greatest crisis in theoretical physics, the cosmological-constant problem.
Author(s): Helge S. Kragh, James M. Overduin (auth.)
Series: SpringerBriefs in Physics
Edition: 1
Publisher: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
Year: 2014
Language: English
Pages: 113
Tags: Cosmology; History and Philosophical Foundations of Physics; Philosophy of Science
Front Matter....Pages i-viii
Early Ideas of Space and Vacuum....Pages 1-6
The Active Ether....Pages 7-12
Planck’s Second Quantum Theory....Pages 13-18
Half-Quanta and Zero-Point Energy....Pages 19-27
Nernst’s Cosmic Quantum-Ether....Pages 29-38
The Hamburg Connection....Pages 39-46
The Cosmological Constant....Pages 47-56
From Casimir to Zel’dovich....Pages 57-65
Inflation and the False Vacuum....Pages 67-76
Variable Cosmological Constants and Quintessence....Pages 77-87
How Heavy Is the Vacuum?....Pages 89-99
The Accelerating Universe....Pages 101-110
Back Matter....Pages 111-113
