Einstein's Real "Biggest Blunder"

TL;DR

This paper argues that Einstein's fundamental mistake was not introducing the cosmological constant but failing to distinguish between active and passive gravitational mass, which could have led to groundbreaking cosmological discoveries.

Contribution

It highlights a missed conceptual distinction in Einstein's early work that, if addressed, might have revolutionized cosmology decades earlier.

Findings

Potential prediction of inflation and big bounce phenomena

Insight into the nature of dark matter and cosmic structure

Reinterpretation of Einstein's original field equations

Abstract

Albert Einstein's real "biggest blunder" was not the 1917 introduction into his gravitational field equations of a cosmological constant term \Lambda, rather was his failure in 1916 to distinguish between the entirely different concepts of active gravitational mass and passive gravitational mass. Had he made the distinction, and followed David Hilbert's lead in deriving field equations from a variational principle, he might have discovered a true (not a cut and paste) Einstein-Rosen bridge and a cosmological model that would have allowed him to predict, long before such phenomena were imagined by others, inflation, a big bounce (not a big bang), an accelerating expansion of the universe, dark matter, and the existence of cosmic voids, walls, filaments, and nodes.