Einstein obviously thought critcally to be able to do what he did. But he still,wrongly, put a constant in his General Theory, simply because he didn't like what his science was telling him. That is, his IDEOLOGY was telling him constant, unchanging universe and his science that it was anything but.
I might have misunderstood the little I've seen and read about this but my understanding is that Einstein added the constant not because of any ideological reasons but because
at the time he was working there was no evidence of an expanding Universe. It was a decade later that Hubble first produced evidence of the expanding Universe.
In other words he was working with the evidence available at the time - of course he missed a chance to be regarded as even smarter than he was (he could have predicted an expanding Universe before it was known about).
Maybe one of our cosmological experts knows for sure?
Edit: I started writing this before Iason posted the reply above
This message has been edited by MangyTiger, 08-01-2005 09:30 PM
Oops! Wrong Planet