Irish-based physicists have unearthed a previously unrecognised academic paper by Albert Einstein.
The paper reveals that the scientific genius once considered a mathematical model of the universe very different to today's widely accepted Big Bang theory.
The discovery was made by Waterford Institute of Technology scientists, Dr Cormac O'Raifeartaigh and Dr Brendan McCann, while they were examining documents held at the Albert Einstein Archives in Jerusalem.
The document, thought to have been written in the 1930s, had been incorrectly classified as a first draft of another paper by German-born theoretical physicist Einstein.
The model laid out in the draft suggested the universe is expanding steadily, an idea that is at odds with what we know now as the Big Bang. It was put forward several years earlier by Alexander Friedmann, George Lemaitre, Edwin Hubble and others, who developed the idea that the universe was expanding as a result of a single big explosive event.
However, Einstein didn't develop or complete his model beyond the handwritten draft discovered by the WIT team. However the same concept of a steady expansion was later put forward by British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, two decades after Einstein had pondered the possibility.
Hoyle's theory was that the universe expanded constantly and steadily by continually adding new matter spontaneously, and kept a constant density. However it was controversial and was ruled out later by scientists who studied and secured evidence using astronomy.
The fact that Einstein had been considering the same theory two decades earlier, however, would likely have lent significant weight to Hoyle's argument at the time.
Experts say the draft discovered by the WIT researchers was probably worked on as a new idea by Einstein, but was most likely abandoned shortly afterwards when Einstein discovered that the mathematics didn't work. However, despite his failure to develop the theory, Einstein remained sceptical of the alternative Big Bang concept, despite the fact it fitted in neatly with his own theory of relativity.
Dr O'Raifeartaigh and Dr McCann, working with collaborators at Cambridge University and the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, have submitted a translation and analysis of Einstein's manuscript to the European Physical Journal.
