History
In 1934, Georges Lemaître used an unusual perfect-fluid equation of state to interpret the cosmological constant as due to vacuum energy. In 1948, the Casimir effect provided the first experimental verification of the existence of vacuum energy. In 1957, Lee and Yang proved the concepts of broken symmetry and parity violation, for which they won the Nobel prize. In 1973, Edward Tryon proposed that the Universe may be a large-scale quantum-mechanical vacuum fluctuation where positive mass-energy is balanced by negative gravitational potential energy. During the 1980s, there were many attempts to relate the fields that generate the vacuum energy to specific fields that were predicted by attempts at a Grand unification theory and to use observations of the Universe to confirm one or another version. However, the exact nature of the particles (or fields) that generate vacuum energy, with a density such as that required by inflation theory, remains a mystery.
Read more about this topic: Vacuum Energy
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)