EINSTEIN’S ‘BLUNDER’ MAY BE CORRECT AFTER ALL

Oxford University scientists believe the universe may be filled with a mysterious “dark fluid” — predicted by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago. In 1917, Einstein suggested the vacuum of space must contain enough energy to balance the effects of gravity, but by 1931 he had dismissed it as his “greatest-ever blunder.” Since the late ’90s, 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. The new model was published in the Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics.