358 | Solo: Vacuum Energy and the Cosmological Constant (opens in new tab)

The most surprising discovery in fundamental physics during my career as a scientist was undoubtedly the , announced in 1998. The most straightforward explanation for these observations is a positive cosmological constant, or vacuum energy. I talk about the origin of the idea with Einstein, how quantum physicists started to think about it and understand the "cosmological constant problem," as well as how its discovery also raised the "coincidence problem." This is the first of two connected s...