The Cosmological Constant

The Cosmological Constant

Hawking, Stephen
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences 310, no. 1512 (1983): 303-310
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.1983.0092

“The history of the cosmological constant goes back to the seventeenth century. Newton realized that the so-called ‘fixed stars’ were like the Sun and he postulated that they were distributed approximately uniformly throughout space. This raised a problem: how could they remain at roughly constant distances from each other if they were attracting each other according to the law of gravity? Why did they not all fall together? One possible solution was to add a repulsive (in both senses of the word) ‘cosmological’ term to the Newtonian equation...”

— Stephen Hawking