4Įinstein published the Mercury orbit calculation, and its match to observation on 18 November 1915, together with his prediction for the gravitational light bending. The third is the gravitational redshift of light for a particle moving through a gravitational potential this last was determined unambiguously only in the 1960s. ![]() The second is the predicted amplitude of bending by a light-ray from a background star passing the Sun (1.75 arcsec at the Sun's limb). In the order presented by Einstein, the first is the rate of precession of the orbit of the planet Mercury around the Sun (an additional 43 arcsec per century, observation at the time required 45±5 arcsec per century). The 1915 publication of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity included three definitive and necessary observational tests for which the General Relativistic prediction differed from flat space-time ‘Newtonian’ values. 2 This evidence, complementing the earlier (1915) evidence that the theory explained an anomaly in the orbit of the planet Mercury, established General Relativity as a valid theory of space-time and made Einstein famous. 1 These determined that the reality and amplitude of gravitational light bending by the Sun were consistent with Einstein's 1915 predictions, and significantly inconsistent with the Newtonian flat-space-time prediction. We reanalyse the 1919 data, and identify the error that undermines the conclusions of Earman and Glymour.Ħ November 2019 was the centenary of the presentation to a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society of the scientific results from the May 1919 solar eclipse expeditions. The 19 analyses of the same data provide two discordant conclusions. This claim, and the resulting accusation of Eddington's bias, was repeated with exaggeration in later literature and has become ubiquitous. However, in 1980 a study by philosophers of science Earman and Glymour claimed that the data selection in the 1919 analysis was flawed and that the discarded data set was fully valid and was not consistent with the Einstein prediction, and that, therefore, the overall result did not verify General Relativity. Three data sets were obtained: two showed the measured deflection matched the theoretical prediction of Einstein's 1915 Theory of General Relativity, and became the official result the third was discarded as defective.Īt the time, the experimental result was accepted by the expert astronomical community. ![]() Einstein became world famous on 7 November 1919, following press publication of a meeting held in London on 6 November 1919 where the results were announced of two British expeditions led by Eddington, Dyson and Davidson to measure how much background starlight is bent as it passes the Sun.
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