Prize for dark energy

SciAm reports:

An Accelerating Universe: The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics

Listen to the announcement of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, to Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Reiss, from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Following the formal announcement comes an explanation of the research, which tracked type Ia supernovae to discover that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. And a phone conversation with new Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt

Schmidt spends much of the time saying that he was validating Einstein. The idea is that the dark energy is the energy of the aether, and pervades all of spacetime uniformly.

Einstein proposed a cosmological constant in order to justify a steady-state universe. When he learned that the universe was expanding, he said that the constant was his greatest mistake. This prizewinning work really does not have much to do with Einstein.