Chapters 11 and 12 Summary and Analysis

In Chapter 11, Einstein's theory indicated that the universe was not static, that it was constantly expanding. There was no real evidence; however, but logic told Einstein that there was validity to the concept. He added what he termed the "cosmological constant" to his theory which, to him, disturbed the beauty of it. That addition was later debunked by Aleksandr Friedmann who discovered that the physics maestro had made a calculation error. American Vesto Slipher published a paper in 1917 which provided evidence that the universe was expanding. Slipher, trying to capture rotation velocities of nebulae, discovered a red shift, or Doppler shift, in the spectral lines of spiral galaxies. The red shift in a spectroscopy indicated movement away from, in theses cases, the earth.

Slipher didn't fully understand what he had discovered but his findings were later used by Edwin...