You obviously have no idea how absurdly ironic your position is. You are defending Einstein for including a parameter he had zero empirical justification for and added due to a wrong theoretical prejudice, while condemning modern cosmologists for including exactly the same parameter because they were reluctantly forced to by strong empirical evidence.
More irony (no pun intended!):
At no time did Einstein's use of lambda imply either: A) expanding "space" (physically undefined), or B) repulsive gravity. Neither of these things were true in Einstein's use of lambda. He simply used lambda to keep "spacetime" from collapsing. To do that, he simply "assumed" the existence of (external/eternal) matter and the attractive aspects of gravity. At no time did he try to make "space" (physically undefined) go through any sort of "acceleration". You're completely overlooking some important fundamental differences between the way Einstein used lambda in his own attempt to create a "static" universe and your use of that term to create a metaphysical mythology related to "expanding space". These are two *ENTIRELY* different ideas sol, and I know that you have the ability to see that for yourself.
That is completely wrong.
Uh, not
completely. The highlighted sentence (and only the highlighted sentence) happens to be (almost) true.
Yes, Einstein used lambda to keep spacetime from collapsing. More precisely, Einstein used lambda for his ideologically motivated
attempt to keep spacetime from collapsing. He had no
empirical justification for lambda, but he was
ideologically committed to a static spacetime that would neither expand forever nor collapse. Without lambda, adding enough mass to prevent expansion would cause collapse. Adding lambda to the equation allowed what Einstein thought would be an ideologically acceptable static solution; as was soon pointed out, however, that solution's instability makes it physically unacceptable.
Long after Hubble's law, the microwave background radiation, and other evidence for the Big Bang and an expanding universe had led Einstein and other physicists to conclude lambda was zero and should be dropped, physical evidence overcame that historical bias
against lambda and brought it back into the equation. As
sol invictus wrote, that's the true irony here.
As this thread appears to be winding down, I'd like to thank all the knowledgeable contributors for their efforts, which taught me a little of what's been discovered since I last read up on this some thirty years ago.
I'd also like to thank
Michael Mozina for starting this thread, without which those efforts might not have appeared necessary.
