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The displacement of spectral lines towards the red end of the spectrum was definitely established by Adams in 1924, by observations on the dense companion of Sirius, for which the effect is about thirty times greater than for the Sun. R.W.L.—translator
APPENDIX IV
THE STRUCTURE OF SPACE ACCORDING TO THE GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY
(SUPPLEMENTARY TO SECTION XXXII)
Since the publication of the first edition of this little book, our knowledge about the structure of space in the large (“cosmological problem”) has had an important development, which ought to be mentioned even in a popular presentation of the subject.
My original considerations on the subject were based on two hypotheses:
(1) There exists an average density of matter in the whole of space which is everywhere the same and different from zero.
(2) The magnitude (“radius”) of space is independent of time.
Both these hypotheses proved to be consistent, according to the general theory of relativity, but only after a hypothetical term was added to the field equations, a term which was not required by the theory as such nor did it seem natural from a theoretical point of view (“cosmological term of the field equations”).
Hypothesis (2) appeared unavoidable to me at the time, since I thought that one would get into bottomless speculations if one departed from it.
However, already in the ’twenties, the Russian mathematician Friedman showed that a different hypothesis was natural from a purely theoretical point of view. He realized that it was possible to preserve hypothesis (1) without introducing the less natural cosmological term into the field equations of gravitation, if one was ready to drop hypothesis (2). Namely, the original field equations admit a solution in which the “world radius” depends on time (expanding space). In that sense one can say, according to Friedman, that the theory demands an expansion of space.