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The Weight of the Vacuum pp 89–99Cite as

How Heavy Is the Vacuum?

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Abstract

Well into the 1990s, most cosmologists preferred not to speak of the cosmological constant. This attitude was justified partly by the deep theoretical uncertainty surrounding the status of vacuum energy, and partly by the degree of fine-tuning that seemed to be implied in models whose density of vacuum energy was comparable to that of matter. Nevertheless the cosmological constant was trotted out whenever some crisis arose within cosmology that could not be explained any other way. Two examples that received attention in the 1960s were the concentration of quasars within a narrow range of high redshifts, and the tension between the age of the universe implied by measurements of the Hubble expansion rate and the age of the oldest stars. In the 1980s, vacuum energy was revived again to bridge the gap between the observed low density of matter and the expectation (based on inflation) that the total density of the universe should be exactly critical. The lack of anisotropy observed in the cosmic microwave background prior to 1992 was also taken as possible evidence for a \(\varLambda \) term. Tentative measurements of a nonzero dark-energy density were first obtained with counts of faint galaxies and analyses of absorption lines in the Lyman-\(\alpha \) forest, but seemed to conflict with upper limits based on the statistics of gravitational lenses.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This problem goes back to 1930 with Hubble’s original and erroneously high value for the expansion rate (Kragh 1996, pp. 73–79 and references therein).

  2. 2.

    Fukugita later recalled that invoking the cosmological constant was treated by many at the time as a “crime, or offense against the rules” (Fukugita 2014).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Science Studies, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Helge S. Kragh

  2. Department of Physics, Astronomy and Geosciences, Towson University, Towson, MD, USA

    James M. Overduin

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  1. Helge S. Kragh
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  2. James M. Overduin
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Correspondence to Helge S. Kragh .

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Kragh, H.S., Overduin, J.M. (2014). How Heavy Is the Vacuum?. In: The Weight of the Vacuum. SpringerBriefs in Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55090-4_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55090-4_11

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