> Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Prince of Mathematicians but also somewhat of a coward, was certainly aware of the fate of Galileo —and could probably have predicted the calumniation of Einstein— when he decided to suppress his discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, thus leaving it to Bolyai and Lobatchewsky to receive the flak.
There's a long history of mathematicians and scientists suppressing their results.
Copernicus didn't publish about heliocentrism until he was on his deathbed.
Newton started developing calculus in 1665 but didn't publish his theories and methods for calculus until 1693.
Darwin didn't publish until 1858, when Alfred Wallace had begun to rediscover Darwin's theories. Darwin had already theorized about natural selection for himself and privately among naturalist friends since he returned from the Beagle in 1836.
I am not a physicist, but my understanding is that Einstein's formulas showed him that the universe was expanding. He didn't trust what his own formulas, which were radical at the time, were showing him, so he modified his equations so that the universe would be stable - adding a cosmological constant. Observations by astronomers like Hubble later showed him that his original formulas were correct (my understanding of the field equations are shallow so I may have mischaracterized this).
> Einstein's formulas showed him that the universe was expanding.
More precisely, they showed him that there was no solution describing a static universe; the universe would have to be either expanding or contracting. Nothing in the math gave any reason to favor expansion over contraction; it's just that, since we now know the universe is expanding, that's the possibility we always focus on when talking about this episode.
> He didn't trust what his own formulas, which were radical at the time, were showing him
I don't think it was that he didn't trust the formulas; he had already explored other solutions that were giving correct predictions. It was just that he thought the universe should be static, so he didn't like the fact that there wasn't a static solution to his original equations.
> Observations by astronomers like Hubble later showed him that his original formulas were correct
More precisely, they showed that the universe was expanding, so there was no need to insist on having a static solution to the equations. But, as FreeFull pointed out, we now know that there is a nonzero cosmological constant, so Einstein's original equations, without that constant, weren't quite correct anyway.
And then we have found the acceleration of the universe is accelerating, and the cosmological constant starts looking relevant again. What Einstein called his biggest blunder might not be a blunder at all.
There's a long history of mathematicians and scientists suppressing their results.
Copernicus didn't publish about heliocentrism until he was on his deathbed.
Newton started developing calculus in 1665 but didn't publish his theories and methods for calculus until 1693.
Darwin didn't publish until 1858, when Alfred Wallace had begun to rediscover Darwin's theories. Darwin had already theorized about natural selection for himself and privately among naturalist friends since he returned from the Beagle in 1836.
I am not a physicist, but my understanding is that Einstein's formulas showed him that the universe was expanding. He didn't trust what his own formulas, which were radical at the time, were showing him, so he modified his equations so that the universe would be stable - adding a cosmological constant. Observations by astronomers like Hubble later showed him that his original formulas were correct (my understanding of the field equations are shallow so I may have mischaracterized this).