Monday, May 29, 2017

Eddington

May 29, 1919.
The English astronomer Arthur Eddington set up telescopes and cameras on Príncipe, an island off western Africa and waited for the eclipse. Einstein's Theory of Relativity predicted that gravity should bend light. So light from distant stars should curve as it passed by the sun. If true, the stars’ positions in the sky should appear to shift compared with their true positions. The sun’s brightness made this shift impossible to observe, of course—except during an eclipse, when stars could peek out from behind its shadow. 
On May 29, 1919, with the world still smoldering from another homicidal period of parochial war, an Englishman set his telescope up in Africa to prove the thesis of a German, a thesis about the rules of the universe. It was cloudy and had rained earlier; Eddington was worried. But he got 16 pictures but only two of value. But it was enough.
Eddington later said it was the greatest day of his life.

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