When Albert Einstein died in 1955, he had revolutionized our understanding of space and time. So what did he foresee about such concepts as Black Holes, Dark Matter and Dark Energy? The following lines are written with reference made to the Nobel Prizes in Physics awarded in 2020, 2019 and 2011.

Sir Roger Penrose iwas awarded one half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his theoretical work on Black Holes. He proved that their existence is a realistic expectation from Einstein’s theory of gravitation. Also Sir Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation had earlier been used for discussing the possible existence of invisible super massive objects where the escape velocity would be higher than the velocity of light in vacuum. Einstein did never believe in such objects as a physical reality.

Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez shared the second half of the 2020 Nobel Prize for the discovery that an invisible and extremely heavy object controls the star orbits near the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The only logical interpretation is that the object is a supermassive Black Hole.

It was a good choice that Penrose shares the Nobel Prize with the other two physicists. He made his pioneering contribution in 1965 and has up to his present age of 90 years actively contributed to what we know today about the universe. It has been done in collaboration with many others, including the famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking who passed away three years ago.

The concept of a Black Hole at the center of our galaxy as now supported by the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics is easier to discuss than the Dark Matter concept for explaining the strength of the cohesive gravitational force inside the galaxy and the Dark Energy concept for explaining the accelerated cosmic expansion. While supported by the Nobel Prizes in Physics awarded 2019 och 2011, respectively, their nature is considered mysterious although Dark Energy is commonly related to the cosmological constant proposed by Einstein. In half a dozen texts published from 2009 up to 2019 by the Swedish Mathematical Society, all known interpretations of the two “dark” concepts were challenged by me.

Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution to quantum physics. He had until his death a focus on developing a unified field theory for the electromagnetic and gravitational forces so it seems to me that his famous skill of making thought experiments should have made him predict the existence of Dark Matter as accumulations of elementary mass particles providing the gravitational force in analogy with the elementary charge particles providing the electromagnetic force. In the above-mentioned texts, this prediction results from a proposed “Wave Theory of Time” (WTT) linking the strength ratio between the electromagnetic and gravitational forces to a rest mass ratio for their elementary particles.

WTT uses a continuous wave model where a scale of time itself varies with a period in the order of 10²⁰ seconds determining the gravitational force described by Einstein’s curved spacetime and where another scale of time varies with a period in the order of 1/10²⁰ seconds determining the electromagnetic force. This explanatory model makes it possible to see the velocity of the cosmic expansion either as increasing with respect to time counted by the atomic clocks which rely on the stability of the elementary charge particles or as decreasing with respect to time counted by an alternative clock which here is named the Einstein clock and which relies on the stability of light wave propagation in vacuum as used in Einstein’s thought experiments.

It was his strong belief in a static universe which in 1917 motivated Einstein’s proposal of a cosmological constant representing a repulsive force that counteracts the cohesive gravitational force. The discovery in the late 1920s that the universe is expanding made him regret this proposal as his biggest blunder. However, the discovery in 1998 that the velocity of the expansion of the universe is increasing made cosmologists quickly state that Einstein was right in believing in a force that counteracts the cohesive gravitational force and that is represented by the cosmological constant. The latter has a magnitude that is linked to the increasing velocity of the cosmic expansion as measured with respect to time counted by the atomic clocks. However, the velocity of the cosmic expansion is not increasing if measured with respect to time counted by the Einstein clock. Then the magnitude of the cosmological constant vanishes and the Dark Energy mystery disappears.

The Earth provided a wrong reference for discovering the nature of the planet orbits in the solar system, and atomic clocks provide the wrong reference for discovering the nature of the cosmic expansion. In a thought experiment where the Einstein clock is the one and only available reference for describing an expansion of space in a universe with elementary mass particles but without the elementary charge particles, WTT shows that the physical reality of Dark Energy is an unnecessary assumption. What scientific authorities now describe as about 70% of the total energy in the universe could be the biggest bubble ever.