100 years after ‘worst blunder’, Einstein is proved correct

THE universe may be filled with a mysterious “dark fluid” – predicted by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago, Oxford University scientists believe.

In 1917, Einstein suggested the vacuum of space must contain enough energy to balance the effects of gravity, which he dubbed the “cosmological constant”, but by 1931 he had dismissed it as his “greatest-ever blunder”.

Since the late Nineties, scientists have believed a combination of invisible dark matter and dark energy makes up 95 per cent of the universe, keeping galaxies together, but have failed to find direct evidence of either.

Now scientists at Oxford believe dark energy and dark matter are in fact a single phenomenon – an invisible fluid that acts like a field of negative gravity.

Dr Jamie Farnes, of Oxford’s department of engineering science, said: “We now think that both dark matter and dark energy can be unified into a fluid, which possesses a type of ‘negative gravity’, repelling all other material around them. The outcome seems rather beautiful: dark energy and dark matter can be unified into a single substance, with both effects being simply explainable as positive mass matter surfing on a sea of negative masses.”

Dr Farnes plans to test the theory using the world’s largest telescope, which is expected to be operational by 2022. “If real, it would suggest that the missing 95 per cent of the cosmos had an aesthetic solution: we had forgotten to include a simple minus sign,” he said.

The new model was published in the Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics.