Discovery of Hubble's Law as a Series of Type III Errors

Abstract

Recently much attention has been paid to the discovery of Hubble's law -the linear relation between the rate of recession of the distant galaxies and distance to them.Though we now mention several names associated with this law instead of one, the motivation of each remains somewhat obscure. As it is turns out, two major contributors arrived at their discoveries from erroneous reasoning, thus making a case for a Type III error.It appears that Lemaitre (1927) theoretically derived Hubble's Law due to his choice of the wrong scenario of the Universe's evolution. tested the linearity law not based on Lemaitre's non-static model, but rather a cumbersome extension of de Sitter's static theory proposed by Weyl (1923) and Silberstein (1924).

Reasons in Favor of a Hubble-Lemaître-Slipher’s (HLS) Law

“…Had the creator of General Relativity, or maybe also W. de Sitter (who had himself already discovered an expanding solution, as early as 1917, although for a massless universe) realized these implications, they could have predicted the expansion of the universe from purely theoretical grounds, before astronomical evidence was there. Belenkiy sustains the opinion that, had this been the case, Einstein himself together with Friedmann and Slipher could had been solid candidates for a Nobel Prize in Physics [36].…”

“…[40] This, together with the fact that Lemaître had sent Eddington again his 1927 paper, led soon the latter to re-consider at last Lemaître's work as a great discovery. An additional point, as explained in [36], is that both Hubble's and Lemaître's findings were made in spite of mistaken assumptions, and it happened that neither Lemaître immediately nor Hubble ever renounced their mistaken beliefs. In a 1930 letter to Eddington, Lemaître writes (still not realizing the mistake in putting the spurious logarithmic term in his model, to make it unbounded in time): "I consider a Universe of constant curvature in space but increasing with time and I emphasize the existence of a solution in which the motion of the nebulae is always a receding one from time minus infinity to plus infinity."…”

“…Hubble's confirmation was not related with non-static solutions for the universe until early in 1930 when A. Eddington and W. de Sitter became fully aware of Lemaître's 1927 paper. As rightfully pointed out by Belenkiy [36]: "Errors can still lead to progress. The errors made on the way to the discovery of the expanding universe by the pioneers of modern cosmology did not prevent the cosmological community from getting finally the right physical interpretation."…”

Reasons in favor of a Hubble-Lemaître-Slipher's (HLS) Law

“…Had the creator of General Relativity, or maybe also W. de Sitter (who had himself already discovered an expanding solution, as early as 1917, although for a massless universe) realized these implications, they could have predicted the expansion of the universe from purely theoretical grounds (as Pauli did later, in predicting the existence of the neutrino, or Dirac with the positron prediction), before astronomical evidence was there. Belenkiy sustains the opinion that, had this been the case, Einstein himself together with Friedmann and Slipher could had been solid candidates for a Nobel Prize in Physics [34]. [37].…”

“…Some other scientists, as Carl Wirtz, Ludwik Silberstein, Knut Lundmark, or Willem de Sitter himself, were actually looking for a redshift-distance relation of the same kind, which could fit into the context of de Sitter's model [24] (see also [12]). As reported in [34], the first theoretical explanation capable of accounting for the Doppler Effect, as conjectured by Slipher, was suggested by Alexander Friedmann in 1922 [35] "the Universe may expand since General Relativity (GR) equations admit dynamical solutions. "…”