One physicist who challenged the orthodoxy was the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg.* In a paper published in 1987, more than a decade before the revolutionary supernova measurements, Weinberg suggested an alternative theoretical scheme that yielded a decidedly different outcome: a cosmological constant that is small but not zero. Weinberg’s calculations were based on one of the most polarizing concepts to have gripped the physics community in decades—a principle some revere and others vilify, a principle some call profound and others call silly. Its official, if misleading, name is the
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