The letter by Michael Way and Harry Nussbaumer (PHYSICS TODAY, August 2011, page 8) refers to Edwin Hubble’s “discovery” of the expansion of the universe as one of the “falsehoods still being promoted today” by “prominent people writing in the popular press.” I note that the same story was also promoted early on by Albert Einstein. I found the following in his Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (Random House, 1961), which I had just finished rereading when my issue of PHYSICS TODAY arrived. In appendix 4, apparently written sometime before June 1952, Einstein writes about the impact to his general theory of the discovery of the nonstatic nature of the universe. After a discussion about Alexander Friedmann but no mention of Georges Lemaître, Einstein says,
A few years later Hubble showed, by a special investigation of the extra-galactic nebulae (“milky ways”), that the spectral lines emitted showed a red shift which increased regularly with the distance of the nebulae. This can be interpreted in regard to our present knowledge only in the sense of Doppler’s principle, as an expansive motion of the system of stars in the large—as required, according to Friedman, by the field equations of gravitation. Hubble’s discovery can, therefore, be considered to some extent as a confirmation of the theory.
