Before revision: Cosmological constant In theoretical physics, when Albert Einstein originally tried to produce a general theory of relativity, he found that the theory seemed to predict the gravitational collapse of the universe: it seemed that the universe should either be expanding or collapsing, and to produce a model in which the universe was static and stable (which seemed to Einstein at the time to be the "proper" result), he introduced an expansionist variable (called the Cosmological Constant ), whose sole purpose was to cancel out the cumulative effects of gravitation.
After revision: Cosmological constant In theoretical physics, when Albert Einstein originally tried to produce a general theory of relativity, he found that the theory seemed to predict the gravitational collapse of the universe: it seemed that the universe should either be expanding or collapsing, and to produce a model in which the universe was static and stable (which seemed to Einstein at the time to be the "proper" result), he introduced an expansionist variable (called the cosmological constant ), whose sole purpose was to cancel out the cumulative effects of gravitation.