A Revolution in Science: the Eclipse Expeditions of 1919

From an astronomical and relativistic point of view, the Great War began with the August, 1914 capture and imprisonment of the members of a German eclipse expedition that had gone to the Crimea to look, at the request of Einstein, for bending of starlight by the sun. And it ended in 1919 with the Eddington-inspired measurements of that light bending from Principe and Sobral and with the founding of the International Astronomical Union by scientists from "the countries at war ...

This article reviews the early academic and public reception of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in the Netherlands, particularly after Arthur Eddington's eclipse experiments of 1919. Initially, not much attention was given to relativity, as it did not seem an improvement over Hendrik A. Lorentz' work. This changed after the arrival in Leiden of Paul Ehrenfest. Soon relativity was much studied and lead to controversy among a number of conservative intellectuals, as else...

Neither the world nor science came to an end when the gunfire stopped on 11 November 1918 (close to 11 AM in some time zone), but neither would ever be the same again. Part I of this inquiry (Observatory 138, 46-58, April 2018) looked at the development of general relativity under the Rubric of Gerald Holton's "Only Einstein, only there, only then." Part II (Observatory 138, 98 116, June, 2018) addressed the activities, relativistic, classical, and otherwise of many (mostly) ...

This article is an overview of 100 years of testing general relativity, to be published in the book General Relativity and Gravitation: A Centennial Perspective, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of general relativity. It is effectively an abridged version of the recent update of the author's Living Review in Relativity.

For the celebrations of the 100 years of the observations undertaken by Eddington at the island of Principe and collaborators at Sobral during a total solar eclipse in May 29, 1919, which have confirmed Einstein's theory of general relativity through the deflection of the incoming light from distant stars due to the spacetime curvature caused by the Sun, we highlight the main aspects of the theory, its tests and applications, focusing on some of its outstanding consequences. ...

In the post-Maxwellian era, sensing that the tide of discoveries in electromagnetim indicated a decline of the mechanical view, Einstein replaced Newton's three absolutes -- space, time and mass, with a single one, the velocity of light. The magnitude of the velocity of light was first determined and proven to be finite independently by Ole Romer and Bradley in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Fizeau carried out the first successful measurement of the speed ...

A century after observing the deflection of light emitted by distant stars during the solar eclipse of 1919, it is interesting to know the concepts emerged from the experiment and the theoretical and observational consequences for modern cosmology and astrophysics. In addition to confirming Einstein's gravitational theory, its greatest legacy was the construction of a new research area to cosmos science dubbed gravitational lensing. The formation and magnification of multiple...

This article is a partly pedagogical, partly historical and partly technical review of special relativity and its experimental foundations, in honor of the centenary of Einstein's annus mirabilis.

Starting with Einstein's famous papers of 1905, we review some of the ensuing developments and their impact on present-day physics. We attempt to cover topics that are of interest to historians and philosophers of science as well as to physicists. This paper will appear in ``2005: The Centenary of Einstein's Annus Mirabilis'', the special March 2006 issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics.

The success of the first measurement of the light bending by the solar gravitational field is due to the particular stellar field during the Eddington's 1919 total eclipse of the Sun, near the Hyades, giving the opportunity to measure the gravitational bending of the light to the astronomers in two expeditions in Brazil, Sobral, and on the Principe Island in the Atlantic Ocean. The geometrical properties of this field and another field in Leo are discussed in view of repeatin...