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Now, lambda is enjoying a second life, but it remains a fudge factor without any physical explanation, and one possible basis for it doesn’t hold up.

You could add a fudge factor to account for future inflation, which is, unfortunately, unpredictable.

“This is not a fudge factor. This is something wrong,” Kaplan said.

This dark energy bears all the earmarks of a fudge factor, called the cosmological constant, that Einstein inserted into his equations a century ago, and later rejected as a blunder.

I totted up what we’d spent on clothes for her in the previous year, added in a 10 percent fudge factor and plunked the money into her savings account just in time for back-to-school shopping.