Eclipse to bend space-time for Meat Cove
As you read this, you are bending space and time.
Now don’t get too pleased with yourself because so is every rock and rabbit on this planet. So is everything with mass.
It’s a pretty crazy thought. And a group of physicists from St. Francis Xavier University are heading to New Brunswick on Monday to see space-time getting bent.
No, they’re not going to Moncton’s Champlain Place Mall. They’re going to the Miramichi to be in the path of totality of the solar eclipse.
“According to Einstein, light is bent by the gravity of the sun,” said Peter Marzlin, chair of the St. F.X. physics department.
“The effect was first observed over a century ago; for our students this would be a lifetime experience.”
There won’t be another total eclipse travelling across the Maritimes for 275 years.
When the moon passes between the sun and Earth on Monday, there will be a relatively narrow 100-kilometre path where the sun is completely blocked out (the path of totality). It will cross New Brunswick and then touch Meat Cove in Cape Breton.
Back in 1919, most of the world wasn’t sold on Einstein’s then-newfangled theory (general relativity) that space-time is like a blanket stretched tight and that matter bends it like if you placed a bowling ball in that blanket’s centre.
And that if light were a golf ball rolled across that blanket, it’s course would bend as it passed the bowling ball.
It was too wacky.
To test it, British astronomers Frank Watson Dyson and Arthur Stanley Eddington went to West Africa and Brazil to be in the path of a total solar eclipse that would travel across the world on May 29, 1919.
When the sun’s light was blocked out, it became night and the stars behind the sun could be seen. They measured the positions of those stars and compared them with their place in pictures taken months earlier.
The difference between the two showed that the light of the stars had been bent (the positions of the stars were different) when it passed around the giant mass of the sun.
“Oh leave the Wise our measures to collate One thing at least is certain, light has weight One thing is certain and the rest debate Light rays, when near the Sun, do not go straight,”
reads a verse Eddington composed and recited for the Royal Astronomical Society dinner at which he presented his findings months later.
“Einstein became a superstar,” said Marzlin.
That’s what the physics department from St. F.X. are going to see in the Miramichi — time and space being bent.
They’ll recreate Eddington’s experiment by photographing the stars as they become briefly visible when the moon blocks out the sun completely.
They’ll take a picture a few months later of the same stars when they’re visible at night.
They’ll measure the difference between the two.
And see theoretical physics at work.
But they’ll need a clear day. If you’ve read this far, indulge yourself in a bit of added wonder. It’s not just light’s course that is bent, time itself gets warped, too.
But that’s a lesson for another day.