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Albert Einstein
112 Mercer Street in Princeton,
New Jersey, United States
14 March 2021
Herr
Issac Newton
Unnamed Apple Tree,
Porters Lodge, Trinity St,
Cambridge CB2 1TQ,
United Kingdom
Lieber Herr Newton,
Hope you are finding peace under that apple tree, the very birthplace of everything that you have gifted to the world, but I have been bothered by some of the recent research works with the potential to subvert the existing structure of science. People in the 21st century are very occupied with themselves, so much that they have very little time for someone’s voice. I cannot blame them too since the world has been tough on them these days. It was not like those times when people are attentive to others' thoughts. Not anymore. But it’s okay, at least they haven’t had a war, like the one during my era (you should definitely read about the Holocaust someday).
Remember how they found discrepancies in the theory of relativity, claiming my years of hard work as incomplete. Well now, they are trying to debunk my findings upon the discovery of Dark-matter-less galaxies. Actually, dark matter was not something that came out of nowhere. It was very obvious(for me at least) from my Field equations of General Relativity. But in my defense, I was going towards a steady Universe and that is where I went wrong. I should have given in to the accelerated universe theory more early and it’s not really a mistake, since it was Hubble who took a lot of time to make those observations of galaxy clusters moving away from us.
It is said that the Galaxies and dark matter go together like peanut butter and jelly(Not to worry, that’s another American thing). Until one of my pupils, Fritz Zwicky discovered how the motion of galaxies in the Coma cluster violated your laws of Gravity, the concept of dark matter was vague. Apparently, the mass of all the stars in the galaxy he observed, formed only 1 percent of what is required to escape the cluster’s gravitational pull. If it was only for the gravity exerted by this visible mass, given the velocity of individual galaxies, they would have escaped the cluster. This suggested the presence of some unseen mass, which stabilised the galaxies. Since no light is seen from this mass, they were called the “dark matter.” These observations were later confirmed by an American prodigy Vera Rubin along with her colleague Kent Ford following the discovery of a similar phenomenon in spiral galaxies.
You know those years from 1910 to 1915 when I was scratching my head, wondering about the theory of gravity? Oh right! Sorry for asking. You don’t. So I finally did something marvelous with gravity that no one expected. You would have gone crazy if you had lived back then. I wrote some beautiful and elegant field equations for describing gravity. They weren’t so simple, you know; not like your regular linear equations and pretty solutions. It was completely a new description that took a long while to get through people’s heads. The equation in itself presented two peculiar details of the universe :
One, the singularities from the equation led to black holes; don’t worry if you are not familiar with these. Even today nobody knows them perfectly. Take them for some places in the universe where all the work we have done never applies and also we cannot work them either!
And the other, when I was trying to apply these equations to the universe, I always ended up with equations that describe a non-steady universe. So I did the same thing that every theorist does; added an extra term into the equations to make a steady-state model of the universe. I thought this was the endgame for the questions pointing towards the ‘fate of the universe’. But as I am writing this to you today, it most certainly is not!
But I wasn’t completely wrong either. The constant which is now called “The cosmological constant” was indeed useful when astronomers were baffled about the fact the observational data of galaxy clusters did not quite corroborate the theory. So the constant went down in history as something which led to the theory of dark matter. People now say:
“Even when einstein is wrong, he is still teaching us something”
I never thought that was a mistake in the first place. You know fixating on some idea is not something new. This happened with quantum theory too. I fought and fought to get rid of the uncertainties and ended up contributing to the concept of ‘Entanglement’ (kindly refer to my EPR paper). And do not even wonder about or try to read quantum theory. That’s some bizarre set of laws because it defies all the laws that we struggled to develop over the years for the macroscopic universe.
Now after all this struggle we have been through, these people even found a few galaxies in the universe completely with very little or no dark matter present. Isn’t that awesome? How do these galaxies even form?
These two, which go by NGC 1052-DF2 and -DF4, respectively, turned the idea of galaxy evolution on its head. Dark matter ought to be the galactic mold, creating the gravitational well that ordinary matter falls into to make galaxies. But if a galaxy is missing dark matter, how can it form in the first place?
That’s something for theorists to put up their thinking caps on once again to come up with something elegant this time, probably some theory which doesn’t cost up to 4.75 billion dollars and a cold war between two parts of the world to test. Given the fact that it is indeed the 21st century, they may even come up with something entirely new. I cannot even get in their way, but I hope they give some ‘cool’ name to it this time. I have always hated that trivial terminology anyway.
Well as expected most of the contemporaries did not take it nicely and they are not to be blamed as it is an unusual result, I mean who would have thought such an uncanny galaxy even existed. The discovery faced many criticisms as they are threatening the current understanding of the formation and evolution of galaxies. The galaxy, NGC 1052-DF2, with very less or no dark matter quite strengthens the dark matter theory or in other words, proves me wrong. The same goes for another one named “Dragonfly 44”, which on the other hand is made almost completely of dark matter. Now my works are on the verge of collapse. With a heavy heart, I am learning new things which, even though, hurts a little, fulfills my thirst for knowledge. Dark matter as the name suggests cannot be understood directly and for over a century people have been trying to solve the mystery. After all these years of experience, one thing I am most sure of about the scientific community is that they never stop searching until they find an answer.
Nice writing to you, Newton. It would be appreciated if you could come out sometimes, evaluate the things for yourself and primarily help me with my concerns.
____________________
Sincerely,
Albert Einstein
Professor, IAS Princeton
SOURCES:
www.nasa.gov
www.amnh.org
skyandtelescope.org
www.calacademy.org
earthsky.org
Written by K.Sandesh, Megha Suresh, Krishna Vijayan
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