The 1919 eclipse that proved Einstein right (and revealed the universe)
Even the most fundamental advances in science can be hostage to luck and sometimes divine inspiration
So this is what it is like to play cosmic pinball. The worlds move, and sometimes they line up. Then you find yourself staring up the tube of blackness that is the moon’s shadow, a sudden hole in the sky during a total solar eclipse.
Such moments have left their marks on human consciousness since before history was recorded.
On Aug. 21, the moon will block the sun in the United Staes, though viewing it in Canada will be less dramatic.
But few eclipses have had more impact on modern history than the one that occurred on May 29, 1919, more than six minutes of darkness sweeping across South America and across the Atlantic to Africa. It was during that eclipse that British astronomer Arthur Eddington ascertained that the light rays from distant stars had been wrenched off their paths by the gravitational field of the sun.
That affirmed the prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, ascribing gravity to a warp in the geometry of space-time, that gravity could bend light beams.
“Lights All Askew in the Heavens,” read a headline in the New York Times.
Eddington’s report made Einstein one of the first celebrities of the new 20th century and ushered in a new dynamic universe, a world in which space and time could jiggle, grow, warp, shrink, rip, collapse into black holes and even disappear. The ramifications of his theory are still unfolding; it was only two years ago that a rippling of space-time — gravitational waves produced by colliding black holes — was discovered.
But the first step was not easy. How it happened illustrates that even the most fundamental advances in science can be hostage to luck and sometimes divine inspiration.
The bending of light by gravity was the most stunning and obvious prediction of Einstein’s theory. Astronomers had been trying to detect the effect of solar eclipses since before he had even finished formulating the theory. Nature and politics did not always co-operate.
One of the earliest to try was Erwin Finlay-Freundlich, an astronomer at the Berlin Observatory who was to become a big Einstein booster. Freundlich led an expedition to the Crimea in 1914 to observe an eclipse, but the First World War began and he was arrested as a spy before the eclipse occurred.
So the universe was still up for grabs in March 1919, when Eddington and his colleagues set sail for Africa to observe the next eclipse. Astronomically, the prospects were as good as they could get. During the eclipse, the sun would pass before a big cluster of stars known as the Hyades, so there ought to be plenty of bright lights to see yanked askew.
Eddington was the right man for the job. A math prodigy and professor at Cambridge, he had been an early convert to Einstein’s new theory, and an enthusiastic expositor to his colleagues and countrymen.
Eddington was also a Quaker and so had refused to be drafted into the army. His boss, Frank Dyson, the Astronomer Royal of Britain, saved Eddington from jail by promising that he would undertake an important scientific task, namely the expedition to test the Einstein theory.
Eddington also hoped to help reunite European science, which had been splintered by the war, Germans having been disinvited from conferences. Now, an Englishman was setting off to prove the theory of a German, Einstein.
According to Einstein’s final version of the theory, completed in 1915, as their light rays curved around the sun during an eclipse, stars just grazing the sun should appear deflected from their normal positions by an angle of about 1.75 seconds of arc, about a thousandth of the width of a full moon.
According to old-fashioned Newtonian gravity, starlight would be deflected by only half that amount, 0.86 seconds, as it passed the sun during an eclipse.
A second of arc is about the size of a star as it appears to the eye under the best and calmest of conditions from a mountaintop observatory. But atmospheric turbulence and optical exigencies often smudge the stars into bigger blurs.
So Eddington’s job, as he saw it, was to ascertain whether a bunch of blurs had been nudged off their centres by as much as Einstein had predicted, or half that amount — or none at all. It was Newton versus Einstein. No pressure there.
Dyson was asked by Edwin Cottingham, one of the astronomers on the expedition: what if Eddington measured twice the Einstein deflection? “Then Eddington will go mad and you will come home alone,” Dyson answered.
To improve the chances of success, two teams were sent: Eddington and Cottingham to the island of Principe, off the coast of Africa, and Charles Davidson and Andrew Crommelin to Sobral, a city in Brazil. The fail-safe strategy almost didn’t work.
In Sobral, the weather was unusually cloudy, but a clearing in the clouds opened up only one minute before the moment the moon fully eclipsed the sun. On Principe, it rained for an hour and a half on the morning of the eclipse, and Eddington took pictures through fleeting clouds, hoping some stars would show up.
A few blurry stars were visible on a cou- ple of his photographic plates and a preliminary examination convinced Eddington that the positions of the stars had moved during the eclipse. He turned to his colleague and said, “Cottingham, you won’t have to go home alone.”
In the end, there were three sets of plates from which the deflection of starlight could be measured. How Eddington and his colleagues played them off against one another sealed the fate of Einstein’s theory.
The best-looking data had come from an Irish telescope in Sobral. The images indicated a deflection of 1.98 seconds of arc — more than Einstein had predicted.
Another Sobral telescope, known as an astrograph, also produced lots of star images, but they were blurred and out of focus. The images gave a value of 0.86 for the deflection, about in line with Newton’s formula, but with big uncertainties.
Finally, there was the Principe telescope, which recorded only a handful of stars, from which Eddington heroically derived a reading of 1.61 seconds of arc.
Which result should Eddington use? If he averaged all three, he would wind up in the unhappy middle ground between Newton and Einstein.
If he just depended on the best telescope, as astronomers and historians John Earman and Clark Glymour pointed out in an influential essay in 1980, the figure of 1.98 would have cast doubt on Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
In the end, Eddington wound up throwing out the Sobral astrograph data on the grounds that it was unreliable. Both of the remaining plates “point to the full deflection1.75 of Einstein’s generalized relativity theory,” Dyson and his colleagues wrote in their official report.
In November 1919, news of Einstein’s triumph was announced to the world with all due pomp and circumstance at a joint meeting of Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society in London.
Presiding over the meeting, physicist J.J. Thomson called general relativity one of the highest achievements of mankind, describing it “as a whole continent of new scientific facts.”
Indeed, what emerged from the moon’s shadow that cloud-speckled day in May was an entirely new universe.