Imagine catching the following three individuals all red-handed, fabricating falsehoods about the theoretical motivations, private concerns and even publicly-reported views of Albert Einstein:
- the Oxford Professor and Nobel Laureate responsible for “the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity,”
- the Albert Einstein Professor in Science and Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, and
- the (then) Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Imagine finding that these three giants of theoretical physics don’t really like doing their homework, preferring instead to rely on hearsay and conveniently misparsed readings they then use to prop up their own work while leaning on Einstein’s legendary intellect to (falsely) prop up their own work.
What would you do?
A decade of silence
When I noticed this more than a decade ago, in typical “nice Canadian” fashion—humble, deferential, a recent PhD from Saskatoon—I approached Paul Steinhardt privately and respectfully.
I had previously written Penrose while finishing my PhD, hopeful my research might interest him. An assistant replied asking for background. After I sent that, I never heard another word. I imagined an aspiring physicist from Saskatoon hadn’t been worth his time. So why would this time be any different?
He likely wouldn’t care to learn from me that he once made a false claim about Einstein. And it was such a clear case of willful misreading—a misattribution via a misread secondary source—that there seemed nothing to gain by pointing it out. Best-case response? “Oh.”
And Turok? The passage in his book with Steinhardt seemed most likely to have come from Steinhardt (which he later confirmed, in a manner of speaking), so I didn’t bother him either. Of course, his name is on the book that tells the false tale, so I don’t feel he’s off the hook; but again, as a polite Canadian I felt it was for Steinhardt to share with him after I’d laid out the facts.
Today, more than a decade later, I’m feeling prickly. Time to call out the lie.
Why now
Maybe it’s because when I contacted him in 2013, Steinhardt minimized the issue and hid behind vague rumours, seeming more interested in locating evidence that would support his narrative than in unearthing the truth. Maybe it’s because more recently he’s declined to give me the time of day—his time, he suggests, is too valuable to waste on me.
Maybe it’s because Penrose has similarly ignored me the couple of times I’ve tried to connect through the years.
Maybe I’m being unfair to Turok, whom I’ve never contacted.
But maybe that doesn’t matter after more than a decade of trying to engage both physicists and philosophers on issues I consider crucial—pointing to specific fallacies that underwrite much of our current thinking about physical reality—only to meet unrelenting deflection or silence.
The cultural problem
I’m slowly realising there’s a sickness in modern physics. Concepts are distorted through lack of clarity and discipline, passed along from one person to the next like a silly game of “telephone.” Only there really isn’t anything funny about it in this case.
Physicists aren’t doing their homework. They move on before they’re sure they’re right. Misinformation and false concepts and claims go unchecked.
And who would check? Penrose, Steinhardt, Turok? They’ve shown they hear and understand things as they want them to be, not as they are.
People like me, who approach privately with evidence? See above.
People like me, who write blog posts about visible errors? Unlikely — physicists dismiss anyone without the intellectual capital of a Penrose, Steinhardt or Turok. I’m not authoritative enough for the facts I present to matter in the face of the falsehoods they prefer.
Here’s a recent example. I completed what I think is an airtight case that much of black-hole physics has, for decades, rested on a logical fallacy—a clear misreading of the mathematics. That should be front-page news: “Physicists have been wrong about black holes for 60 years.” It’s been rejected at a couple of places I submitted — not because anyone showed I’m wrong, but because no one trusts themselves to verify the argument—and I lack the clout to be presumed right.
It’s exhausting. It’s a catch-22. It’s part of why I’m prickly.
In general, I’m feeling tired of lies and falsehoods spun to support ulterior motives. Today’s example: Trump claiming the Ontario government misrepresented Reagan in an ad about tariffs and using the lie to back out of talks to end his trade war — a lie which is actually all aimed at annihilating Canada’s auto sector.
Or another: a British rag congratulating itself for mocking Canadians as pathologically nice—so nice, in fact, that we must be gullible fools. In our “bleeding hearts,” we’re too stupid to separate an author from a world she created—even when celebrating that world is triggering for the very people she targets. The framing casts empathy as idiocy. I’m prickly about that, too.
In short: I’m tired of bad faith — of rhetoric contorted to fit a preferred narrative and serve an agenda.
The Fargo lesson
Over the summer I watched Fargo, Season 3. Its background theme is truth — whether it matters, whether it’s objective… or if it’s whatever we want it to be. In one scene, Carrie Coon’s character Gloria Burgle lays out the case she’s developing. “Well, what do you think?” she asks a colleague. “New Chief isn’t gonna like it,” he answers.
She shoots back a line that should be displayed in every physics lecture hall:
You don’t have to like the truth for it to be true.
That line captures the heart of my concern. The factual error these three made is easy to state: they claimed Einstein proposed a cyclic or “bouncing” cosmology. Superficially, it might not matter whether he did or not (he didn’t).
But what does matter is how the false claim has been arrived at—through sloppy or willful misreadings that can be leveraged to prop up personal agendas.
Penrose’s false claim
Take Penrose, for instance:
“It has been a source of worry to many people that the general theory of relativity—that supremely beautiful description of the geometry of the world—should lead to a picture of spacetime in which singularities are apparently inevitable. Einstein himself had fought against the inevitability of such seeming blemishes to his theory, suggesting different possible ways out, of considerable ingenuity (e.g. the Einstein–Rosen bridge, the attempt at a black-hole-avoiding stable relativistic star cluster, the idea that a non-singular ‘bounce’ of the universe might be achieved through irregularities, even his attempts at modifying general relativity to obtain a singularity-free unified field theory)….”
It’s a great narrative hook. No one wanted singularities; even Einstein tried to avoid them. But physics doesn’t care what we want, and when we finally give in to the mathematics, we find them inevitable. The agenda of Penrose’s paper was, of course, to celebrate the achievements he and others had made in the decades following Einstein’s death.
But physics should never be driven by rhetoric or agenda. Physicists have a single obligation: to understand reality as it is. That requires scepticism toward our own results, humility in the face of the evidence, and a readiness to discover that we might be wrong. We are, after all, only interpreters reading shadows on the wall.
So, Professor Penrose (or anyone else who might read this): if you are so convinced that your reading of the physics is objective and correct, that there is “no way out” of the inferences you’ve drawn, and that your motives are purely to understand reality—then why won’t you consider my argument that your position is itself based on a fallacy?
The Steinhardt–Turok retelling
Where Penrose uses Einstein as a foil—the fallible genius who resisted the implications of his own theory—Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok instead recruit Einstein’s authority to legitimise their own model.
They write:
“Einstein’s opinions on these matters make a particularly interesting case study. By 1931, Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason at the California Institute of Technology had extended Hubble’s earlier analysis to more distant galaxies and solidified the case for an expanding universe. Einstein was now convinced his static model of the universe was wrong and prepared to write a paper stating that his cosmological constant should be abandoned… In the paper he wrote in 1931, though, he not only conceded on the cosmological constant and the static model, but he also suggested exploring an alternative, one of Friedmann’s models. He could have chosen Friedmann’s ever-expanding universe, but he didn’t. Instead, he fixed his attention on Friedmann’s model of a closed, periodic (oscillatory) universe.
Einstein does not explain in his 1931 paper why he made this choice… However, his correspondence… indicates that Einstein’s choice of a periodic universe was quite conscious. Einstein explains to Tolman that he is exploring an ‘oscillatory model’… in which the universe expands and contracts at regular intervals.”
From there, they move on to speculate about the reasons behind this preference.
There are a couple of factual errors here, beginning with the claim that Einstein deliberately chose one specific Friedmann model. This reflects a common misunderstanding: that scientists in the 1920s and ’30s were actually aware of Friedmann’s 1922 and 1924 papers. In fact, Einstein had read Friedmann’s first paper (1922), but he never mentioned it in correspondence, even when doing so would have clarified his views to colleagues. He seems to have preferred others to remain in the dark about those possibilities until 1931, when he finally unearthed the Friedmann paper and explained that if the universe were expanding—as Hubble’s results indicated—the cosmological constant was unnecessary.
But it is highly likely that Einstein never saw Friedmann’s second paper (1924), which Steinhardt and Turok assume he ignored for philosophical reasons. His close collaborator Willem de Sitter, who died in 1934, certainly never did. In 1932, the pair credited Heckmann for discovering that Friedmann’s (1922) original model could be extended to arbitrary curvature. In fact, the only person I have found who knew of both Friedmann papers before 1931 was Howard Robertson, who cited them in 1929.
Why this history matters
The early history of relativistic cosmology—especially the theoretical ideas surrounding an expanding universe and Einstein’s own evolving views, which often conflicted with those around him—is a fascinating story. Yet it is also one that later generations have badly misunderstood. We tend to assume that everyone in the 1920s and ’30s was aware of the seminal papers we all know about today, even though many of them went virtually unnoticed for years or even decades. In retroactively giving credit where it is due, we have quietly washed out the messy, contingent reality of discovery.
Every cosmologist should know that story. It reveals the conceptual and philosophical motivations behind our standard model and explains why it took the form it did; the deeper, less obvious assumptions and the evidence that was taken to motivate them. Modern cosmologists would do well to understand why we ended up with the theory we use today.
As far as I know, the most accurate historiographic account is one I published in 2014. When I shared it with Paul Steinhardt in late 2013, his only comment was: “I enjoyed reading your research regarding Einstein and periodic/oscillatory solutions. It seems you have straightened out the history in an interesting way.”
On that point, what I explained in the paper is that Einstein never once entertained the idea of a periodic or oscillatory universe.
My best guess is that Steinhardt and Turok read only Tolman’s response letter to Einstein of 14 September 1931, not Einstein’s earlier letter of 27 June 1931 in which he enclosed his paper. Relying solely on Tolman’s reply, I think, they inferred—incorrectly—that Einstein had been interested in the model’s periodicity.
He most certainly was not. Their claim that “Einstein’s choice of a periodic universe was quite conscious” is pure fiction: a false inference born of failing to examine the full evidence, fabricating what responsible researchers would have instead looked up, believing their own concoction because it served a biased narrative, and submitting the lie into the public record where it has undoubtedly misled others.
Let’s look at the relevant record.
1917: Einstein’s cosmology
In 1917 Einstein published his static cosmological model, describing a spherical universe held forever in a delicate equilibrium. To keep it from collapsing under its own gravity, he introduced the cosmological constant into his field equations. His main concern in that paper was philosophical as much as mathematical: to construct a model in which matter plays an essential role—one in which spacetime could not be said to exist independently of a significant material component, unlike the empty Minkowski spacetime of special relativity.
To achieve this, Einstein first had to assume—against the spirit of relativity—a preferred state of rest in the universe. “There is a system of reference relatively to which matter may be looked upon as being permanently at rest,” he wrote, justifying it empirically: “The most important fact that we draw from experience as to the distribution of matter is that the relative velocities of the stars are very small as compared with the velocity of light.”
Having made this objective, cosmological separation between space and time, the remaining problem was infinity. In an infinite universe the gravitational potential would diverge. He found he could avoid this by assuming space to be a finite three-dimensional sphere—not a solid ball, but the three-dimensional analogue of a ball’s two-dimensional surface, a curved geometry impossible to visualise yet mathematically well-defined. In such a world, the problem of infinity simply vanished.
Finally, to keep this finite, matter-filled universe from collapsing, Einstein added the cosmological constant, providing an outward pressure to balance gravity’s inward pull.
Einstein’s 1917 paper contains the deepest cosmological reflections he ever published. Later comments were rare, cautious, and often cryptic owing to a lack of supporting reasoning. Yet his motivations can be partially reconstructed from his reactions to others, and it seems the considerations that guided him in 1917 remained remarkably stable throughout his life.
He always regarded the cosmological constant as justified only insofar as it allowed a finite, matter-filled universe free from boundary-value infinities. To achieve that, he was willing to sacrifice pure relativity of motion and accept a preferred cosmic rest frame. And he was willing to modify his field equations—adding the Λ-term—to achieve that vision.
This is the lens through which every subsequent move should be read: the lens Einstein himself provided, and the only one that makes coherent sense of his decisions over the next fifteen years.
De Sitter’s reply
The first response came just a month later, from Willem de Sitter, whose judgment Einstein respected deeply.
De Sitter mocked him—repeatedly. He dismissed Einstein’s concern about the “infinite boundary value” problem, noting that such infinity could never be empirically investigated anyway. Then he demonstrated that once the cosmological constant is admitted, it is indeed possible to construct a model in which the infinity problem disappears without resorting to finite space or abandoning the purest form of relativity.
The sting was that the problem vanished precisely in a universe without matter—a perfect vacuum—and only when the cosmological constant was non-zero. Einstein had, in effect, undermined his own premise and adulterated his equations to do it. De Sitter even criticised Einstein’s insistence that matter must be essential to any relativistic model, remarking that it “serves no other purpose than to enable us to suppose it not to exist.”
Early attempts at explaining expansion
In the years that followed, astronomers such as Vesto Melvin Slipher measured the redshifts of numerous “spiral nebulae,” providing the first empirical hint that these distant systems—soon to be recognised as galaxies—were generally receding from us. The farther away they appeared, the faster they seemed to move.
Among theorists, Arthur Eddington and Hermann Weyl were the first to notice that this apparent cosmic repulsion could be explained by the outward “pressure” associated with Einstein’s cosmological constant. In 1923, Eddington went so far as to suggest that the new redshift data might favour de Sitter’s vacuum solution over Einstein’s matter-filled static universe. That same year, Weyl published an influential analysis showing that in de Sitter’s world, “All stars… flee from any arbitrary star in radial directions; there is inherent in matter a universal tendency to expand which finds its expression in the ‘cosmological term’ of Einstein’s law of gravitation.”
In May 1923, Einstein and Weyl exchanged a short series of postcards. Most of their discussion concerned unified-field theory, but one sentence in Einstein’s note of 23 May stands out for its historical weight:
“With reference to the cosmological problem, I am not of your opinion. Following de Sitter, we know that two sufficiently separate material points are accelerated from one another. If there is no quasi-static world, then away with the cosmological term.”
At that moment, Einstein alone seems to have been aware of Friedmann’s (1922) paper and the implications of his result: the general theory already allowed a dynamical, self-gravitating, matter-filled universe without cosmological constant. To Weyl, who only knew of the static Einstein world and de Sitter’s Λ-driven vacuum, Einstein’s remark must have sounded nonsensical. How could the redshifts, whose only known relativistic explanation lay in de Sitter’s Λ-driven solution, possibly justify abolishing Λ?
Einstein never elaborated, and the following year Weyl published a theatrical dialogue in Die Naturwissenschaften entitled “Massenträgheit und Kosmos” (“Inertia and the Cosmos”), written in Galilean style as a conversation between Saints Peter and Paul—thinly veiled avatars for Einstein and Weyl. The opening section, defiantly titled “And yet it moves!”, was a witty meditation on cosmic dynamics in light of the new redshift data.
In the dialogue, “Petrus” (Einstein) insists that the cosmological constant is a distraction unless it can serve a genuinely Machian purpose:
“If the cosmological term does not help to lead through to Mach’s principle, I consider it completely useless, and I am for a return to the elementary cosmology.”
“Paulus” (Weyl) immediately counters with the astronomical evidence, pointing to the observed redshifts and claiming that these already vindicate de Sitter’s Λ-driven expansion. For Weyl, the cosmological term was not an artificial patch but the key to understanding why galaxies appear to recede.
In short, Weyl had completely inverted Einstein’s reasoning. Einstein’s remark—“if there is no quasi-static world, then away with Λ”—anticipated the dynamical Friedmann solutions: if the universe is not static, the cosmological term has lost its purpose. Weyl, unaware of Friedmann’s solution and thinking only of the Einstein and de Sitter models, took the same data as evidence that Λ must exist. His playful dialogue thus immortalised a misunderstanding—a cosmic comedy of errors in which the two saints talk past one another, one proclaiming the death of Λ in the name of a material universe, the other hailing its triumph as the engine of expansion.
The dialogue closes with Paulus unveiling the new world—de Sitter’s exponentially expanding, matter-free cosmos—standing in stark contrast to Petrus’s call for a Machian, Λ-free ‘elementary cosmology.’
Einstein’s private game
Meanwhile, Einstein was quietly making moves of his own. After reading Friedmann (1922), he submitted a brief note to Zeitschrift für Physik (September 1922):
“The results contained in the cited work relating to a non-stationary world seem suspicious to me. In fact, it is evident that the given solutions are incompatible with the field equations…”
Friedmann promptly wrote to explain the error. Convinced by Friedmann’s reasoning, Einstein retracted his criticism in May 1923, acknowledging that his objection had been based on a miscalculation. His retraction reached Zeitschrift für Physik on 31 May 1923—just eight days after he had posted his cryptic note to Weyl about abandoning Λ. He now wrote:
“I consider Mr. Friedmann’s results correct and clarifying. It is shown that, in addition to the statical, the field equations admit dynamical (therefore varying in the time-coordinate) centrally-symmetric solutions for the spatial structure.”
Evidently, Weyl never saw this retraction either (it only made it to print in December 1923)—else he would have avoided publishing his mistaken dialogue the following year.
Why did Einstein not simply explain himself? The evidence offers no answer. Perhaps by 1923 he was tired of explaining himself. In any case, the pattern was characteristic. A few years later, it replayed in his encounter with Georges Lemaître.
In 1927, Lemaître independently rediscovered Friedmann’s 1922 solution, constructing a model in which the cosmological constant played a central role in driving cosmic expansion—then thought necessary to match the redshift data, though the distances and what we now call Hubble’s law were not yet established. Friedmann had already shown, however, that Λ was unnecessary: expansion could proceed with or without it, decelerating under gravity until eventually reversing.
When Lemaître approached Einstein at the Fifth Solvay Conference in Brussels that same year and asked his opinion, Einstein famously replied:
“Your calculations are correct, but your physical insight is abominable.”
Lemaître had rediscovered Friedmann’s mathematics but attached to it the very Λ-driven interpretation Einstein had already—privately and cryptically—rejected for philosophical reasons.
Einstein (1931)
Einstein said almost nothing about cosmology between 1922 and 1931. Only after Hubble’s observations made cosmic expansion inescapable did he return to the subject publicly—with a short, almost perfunctory paper renouncing the cosmological constant and explicitly adopting Friedmann’s dynamical model.
The 1931 Paper
Einstein’s Zum kosmologischen Problem der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie is astonishingly brief—barely two printed pages—yet it marks the first time he explicitly accepted a dynamical universe. Its tone is cautious; the paper’s purpose is strictly corrective: to show that Hubble’s observed expansion can be reconciled with general relativity without the Λ-term that once sustained the static model.
He begins by restating the field equations without Λ, noting that Friedmann’s earlier work had already demonstrated the existence of time-variable solutions. He then specifies a homogeneous, isotropic line element with positive spatial curvature and derives the corresponding relation between the scale factor, matter density, and curvature radius. Integrating this for Λ = 0 yields the familiar cycloidal form of the scale factor: the universe expands from zero radius, reaches a maximum, then would recontract. Yet Einstein describes only the expanding branch, referring to the epoch of increasing radius as “the solution corresponding to our current state of expansion.” The contracting half is omitted without comment. His focus is entirely on demonstrating that the observed expansion can be explained without Λ—“which is theoretically unsatisfactory in any case.”
What the paper notably does not contain is any reference to cyclicity, periodicity, or a “bounce.” Einstein makes no mention of a return phase, nor of any physical interpretation of the singular state at zero radius. His only interpretive remark is that, extrapolating backward, one would reach a time when “the density of matter would have been extremely high”—a statement of enormous physical consequence but delivered with characteristic understatement. In tone and content, the paper reads less as a bold cosmological manifesto than as an erratum to general relativity itself—the minimal amendment required once one accepts that the universe is not static.
The Einstein–Tolman Correspondence
Einstein shared the paper with Richard Tolman, with whom he had been collaborating on relativistic thermodynamics. In the 27 June 1931 letter accompanying his paper, he downplayed its importance almost to the point of self-effacement. He described the note as containing “only the point that the λ-term is unnecessary if one allows for solutions with time-variable world radius,” which he found “incomparably more satisfying.” He added that he had neglected radiation pressure, regarded the singular origin as an artefact of idealisation, and speculated—without emphasis—that the real, inhomogeneous universe would have been “relatively small and very inhomogeneous” near that epoch. The only quasi-physical comment concerns Lindemann’s suggestion that planet formation might somehow relate to those dense early conditions. He closed with a dry postscript: “As you can see, I am deviating again, to interpret Hubble’s line shifts in a somewhat adventurous way.” Nowhere does he hint at any cyclic or “bouncing” interpretation.
Tolman’s reply of 14 September 1931 was strikingly different in tone. Having read both Einstein’s “cosmological problem” note and his concurrent paper on teleparallelism, Tolman enthusiastically referred to “your proposed quasi-periodic solution for the cosmological line element.” He acknowledged Einstein’s point about inhomogeneity near zero volume but went on to argue that “contraction to a very small volume could only be followed by renewed expansion.” Tolman thus introduced the language of periodicity that Einstein himself had never used, linking it to his own thermodynamic speculations. He even informed Einstein that he had just submitted a paper to Physical Review “discussing, among other things, the application of relativistic thermodynamics to quasi-periodic models of the universe.”
In short, the notion of an oscillatory or cyclic universe entered the record not through Einstein’s initiative but through Tolman’s interpretive enthusiasm.
Steinhardt and Turok’s Misreading
From these two letters alone, the Steinhardt–Turok account is revealed to be inverted. Einstein neither proposed nor even entertained a periodic universe. His 1931 paper contains no reference to contraction or recurrence; his letter to Tolman emphasises only that the cosmological constant is unnecessary once one allows time-variable world radius. It was Tolman—not Einstein—who introduced the notion of “quasi-periodic” behaviour into the conversation, treating it as a plausible extrapolation within the context of his own thermodynamic studies.
The later claim that “Einstein’s choice of a periodic universe was quite conscious” thus arises from reading Tolman’s words backwards into Einstein—a small but consequential historical error.
The evidence is unambiguous: Einstein’s sole concern in 1931—by his own words—was to reconcile the expanding universe with the field equations stripped of Λ. Tolman’s reply, by contrast, ventured into the speculative domain of cyclic cosmology.
The Literature That Misled Penrose
Tolman’s (1931) Physical Review paper referenced Einstein’s note in a subtly misleading way. He closed the introduction with the remark:
“Recently … a simple model of the universe has been discussed by Einstein which exhibits a possibility for quasi-periodic solutions of a type which must now also be considered.”
Einstein’s name carries a footnote:
“Einstein, Berl. Ber. (1931) p. 235. See also de Sitter, Bull. Astron. Inst. Netherlands 6, 141 (1931).”
The placement of that citation is significant—and deceptive to the inattentive reader. Literally, Tolman states that a simple model was recently discussed by Einstein (hence the citation), then adds his own observation that it exhibits a possibility for quasi-periodic solutions. Had Einstein himself mentioned such a possibility, Tolman would have attached the citation to the latter clause, not the former. Anyone who has actually read Einstein’s 1931 paper knows that he did not.
The de Sitter paper cited alongside Tolman’s remark is only slightly less treacherous for the unwary. De Sitter opened by writing:
“The non-static solutions of the field equations of the general theory of relativity … have been investigated by Friedman in 1922 and independently by Lemaître in 1927, and have attracted general attention during the last year or so. Einstein has lately expressed his preference for the particular solution of this kind corresponding to the value λ = 0 of the ‘cosmological constant.’ This solution belongs to a family of oscillating solutions …”
Here it is perfectly clear that Einstein’s preference refers to the Λ = 0 solution, while the description of it as belonging to a family of oscillating models is de Sitter’s own addition. De Sitter also provided the proper citation—Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1931, p. 235—whereas Tolman used the colloquial shorthand “Berl. Ber.,” inviting later confusion.
Why should such a small bibliographic detail matter? In principle it shouldn’t—but in practice, it explains exactly where Penrose’s misunderstanding arose. In the passage quoted earlier, where he attributes to Einstein “the idea that a non-singular ‘bounce’ of the universe might be achieved through irregularities,” Penrose gives the identical citation: “Einstein, A. (1931). Berl. Ber., 235.”
It seems clear that Penrose encountered Tolman’s paper, inferred—incorrectly—that Einstein had proposed a non-singular bounce, and reproduced Tolman’s shorthand reference as supporting evidence. He evidently never read the 1931 paper itself; had he done so, he would have seen that Einstein discussed only the expanding half of Friedmann’s closed model and regarded even that as a purely mathematical construct, physically unrealistic for the early universe. He proposed no bounce.
The entire lineage of the myth thus traces cleanly: from Tolman’s own inference and excitement, to his ambiguous phrasing, to de Sitter’s confirming gloss, to Penrose’s uncritical citation, and finally to Steinhardt and Turok’s confident retelling—the slow accretion of misunderstanding into modern legend.
Rhetoric and the Degradation of Truth
This episode offers a case study in how myth propagates through the scientific literature by gradual rhetorical contagion. A single ambiguous citation in 1931—Tolman’s coupling of Einstein’s name to his own speculation—was amplified by de Sitter’s repetition, canonized by Penrose’s reference, and finally institutionalized through Steinhardt and Turok’s polished retelling. None of these authors fabricated evidence outright; each merely read what he expected, or wished, to find. Yet the cumulative result is a historical falsehood still repeated as fact: that Einstein once proposed a cyclic, bouncing cosmos.
You might think this doesn’t matter—that whether Einstein did or didn’t entertain such a model makes no difference to Penrose’s singularity theorems or to Steinhardt and Turok’s ekpyrotic cosmology. But it matters profoundly. It matters when influential theorists invoke Einstein’s authority to lend their own proposals unearned gravitas or borrowed legitimacy. It matters when rhetorical convenience outweighs accuracy. And it matters because these distortions reveal a deeper pathology in the culture of modern theoretical physics: the casual treatment of historical truth as optional, the quiet presumption that the reputation of a “trusted genius” counts as empirical support.
In Steinhardt and Turok’s case, the motive was straightforward. Their narrative benefitted from a prestigious precedent for the cyclical universe, and so they supplied one—Einstein himself—without ever finding a single line in Einstein’s own hand. The issue is not merely that they were wrong, but that they did not care enough to be right.
In Penrose’s case, the error is of a different but equally revealing kind: a predisposition to interpret evidence through the prism of his own metaphysical convictions—to see in Einstein a mind struggling to accept the same conclusions he himself prefers. That tendency—to read selectively, imprecisely, and in ways that reinforce one’s own agenda—is the very same one I have discussed in my essay on gravitational collapse and the logical fallacy that underwrites modern black hole physics.
I have not yet published that essay online, hoping it might find a broader outlet than my personal website; many outlets will not consider work already posted publicly, and I don’t want to preclude the possibility of wider reach. But if you’re reading this and wish to see it, contact me and I’ll gladly share a copy.
What these examples reveal goes beyond the basic factual error. They prove that even the brightest minds are fallible—that they can look directly at the evidence and see not what is there, but what they wish it to be. Perhaps that is human. But if they can do it once, they can do it again. And if even our greatest physicists are capable of drawing biased inferences, then trust that they infer correctly can never be absolute.
Einstein—who distrusted unexamined authority more than anyone—has thus become its unwitting patron saint. The least we can do, in his name, is to read his words with greater care than was afforded in this case—and to insist, as Gloria Burgle reminds us:
You don’t have to like the truth for it to be true.
cosmiCave.org 
Leave a comment