How a solar eclipse first proved Einstein right
If space were really curved due to matter and energy, we should see light deflect. A solar eclipse provides the perfect opportunity.
“Eddington had needed to make significant corrections to some of the measurements, for various technical reasons, and in the end decided to leave some of the Sobral data out of the calculation entirely. Many scientists were suspicious that he had cooked the books. Although the suspicion lingered for years in some quarters, in the end the results were confirmed at eclipse after eclipse with higher and higher precision.” -Peter Coles
Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity is our most successful, most sophisticated theory of gravity of all-time. Explaining everything from GPS signals to gravitational redshift, from gravitational lensing to merging black holes, and from the timing of pulsars to the orbit of Mercury, the predictions of General Relativity have never once failed. Yet when this theory was first introduced in 1915, it was attempting to replace Newton’s gravitation, which itself had stood unchallenged for over 200 years. Predicting that starlight should bend ever-so-slightly in the vicinity of a large mass, it seemed almost an untestable alternative to Newton’s theory. Yet the phenomenon of a total solar…
