Einstein Might Have Been Wrong About Gravity Here’s Why

Einstein Might Have Been Wrong About Gravity Here’s Why

The universe is expanding, and that expansion is speeding up… which is the opposite of what we expected.

There are lots of different ideas about what could be causing the inexplicable acceleration of this expansion, and one commonly suspected culprit is something called dark energy. Though historically, we aren’t entirely sure what dark energy is either. But now, we might finally have an explanation.

Professor Claudia de Rham at Imperial College London suggests something pretty radical: that gravity has mass.

In Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, gravitons should be massless, but in de Rham’s proposal, the graviton has mass. And if gravitons have mass, then gravity is expected to have a weaker influence on very large distance scales, explaining why the expansion of the universe hasn’t been reined in.

Find out more about De Rham’s radical theory that could hold the key to why the universe is rapidly expanding and explain the nature of dark energy in this Elements.