I generally understand what the problem is, but I’m not good at science and would like to see a simpler and clearer explanation, preferably with some analogies.
In: Physics
The only problem that I know of with the cosmological constant goes something like this: Having a non-zero cosmological constant results in predictions that match fairly well with the best observations we have. But, we have no good idea as to why the cosmological constant has the value that observations seem to be telling us it has. One possible reason for the value of the cosmological constant scientists considered was quantum fluctuations at very small and brief scales, but when this hypothesis was used to estimate the value of the constant, the result was enormously larger than the measured value. The takeaway seems to be that we still don’t know what causes the cosmological constant, and we also don’t have a great idea of what is going on with very small scale quantum fluctuations.
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