Dyson immediately realized that the total solar eclipse in 1919 would prove an ideal test.ĭuring this eclipse, the Sun would sit in front of the Hyades, a cluster of bright stars in the constellation of Taurus. The next year, despite wartime severance of communication channels, Eddington and fellow astronomer Frank Watson Dyson - then director of the Cambridge Observatory and Astronomer Royal, respectively - managed to obtain Einstein’s published papers. The First World War was by then well under way, in all its horror.
Test conditionsĮinstein first publicly aired the general theory of relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1915. It is this curvature that doubles the deflection. And when he calculated the effect, he confirmed that light is deflected (as in the Newtonian theory), but through curved space. Newton’s theory of gravity did not, of course, formulate gravity as a consequence of curved space.
#Shadows of doubt specter evidence original publication full
Tantalizingly, Newton himself had written in his 1704 opus Opticks: “Do not Bodies act upon Light at a distance, and by their action bend its Rays…?” But there is no evidence that he calculated the magnitude of the effect (the first full calculation was published by German mathematician Johann Georg von Soldner, in 1804). This effect had been predicted qualitatively using Newton’s theory of gravity. One of the effects predicted by the new theory was that light rays passing close to a massive body, such as a star, should be bent by its gravitational field. Those momentous ventures form the kernel of three books commemorating the centenary: No Shadow of a Doubt by physicist Daniel Kennefick, Gravity’s Century by science journalist Ron Cowen, and science historian Matthew Stanley’s Einstein’s War.Įinstein’s theory, eight years in the making, sprang from insights he had developed after he published his theory of special relativity in 1905. Eddington is now forever associated with two expeditions to view it: from Sobral in northern Brazil, and the island of Príncipe off the coast of West Africa. The needed eclipse came 100 years ago, in 1919. This was a critical test, because Einstein’s theory predicted a deflection precisely twice the value obtained using Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation. By harnessing a total solar eclipse, he argued that the deflection, or bending, of light by the Sun’s gravity could be measured. An astronomer interested in Einstein’s theory because of its wide-ranging implications for astrophysics and cosmology, Eddington took on the task of proving it. Einstein’s revolution was to change the course of science but in the years immediately after publication, there was no definitive observational evidence that his theory was correct.Įnter Arthur Stanley Eddington. That opened the window on a radically new framework for physics, abolishing established notions of space and time and replacing Newton’s formulation of the laws of gravity. In 1916, Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity in full mathematical detail. Gravity’s Century: From Einstein’s Eclipse to Images of Black Holes Ron Cowen Harvard University Press (2019)Įinstein’s War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I Matthew Stanley Dutton (2019) No Shadow of a Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse That Confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity Daniel Kennefick Princeton University Press (2019)
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