The eclipse that proved Einstein was right | AMS OpenMind

💡 The 1919 Eclipse Expedition: Proving Einstein Right 💡 In March 1919, two British ships embarked on an adventure to observe a total eclipse in two remote tropical locations. 🌍 The challenge was to prove a mind-blowing theory by a German scientist, still unknown outside his country. The Great War had just ended, and the world was divided. Why would this expedition change the history of science forever?

Five years earlier, Albert Einstein had presented his theory of general relativity, proposing that space and time formed a four-dimensional fabric that constituted the universe. 🌌 Massive objects like planets and stars deformed this fabric, and gravity was a consequence of that curvature. This revolutionary idea went almost unnoticed due to the interruption of international communications during World War I. 📡

Fortunately, the theory reached Arthur Eddington, an English astronomer and pacifist who became a supporter of Einstein’s work. But he saw something was missing: experimental proof. Einstein predicted that the curvature of space-time would also bend the path of light. Thus, the light from background stars should be deflected by the Sun’s gravity, making these stars appear displaced in the sky near the Sun. 🌠

The problem? This astonishing prediction seemed impossible to verify because the Sun’s light obscured the stars! Eddington, along with the UK’s Astronomer Royal, Sir Frank Dyson, devised a way to test it during the total solar eclipse of May 29, 1919. The eclipsed Sun would be in front of a star cluster called the Hyades. 🌟

Eddington and Dyson planned to observe the eclipse and precisely locate the Hyades during the event. One ship went to Príncipe Island in the Gulf of Guinea, and the other to Sobral, Brazil. Despite bad weather in Príncipe, Eddington managed to get two usable photos. His colleagues in Brazil had better luck, capturing eight quality photos of the Hyades, showing their positions had shifted exactly as general relativity predicted. Einstein was right! 🎉

Science would never be the same, and neither would Einstein. The physicist became a global icon, and his triumph showed that despite wars and national conflicts, knowledge knows no borders.

#Einstein #GeneralRelativity #ArthurEddington #SolarEclipse #ScienceHistory #Astronomy #Physics #Education #learnsomethingnew

A video by @scienseed4294 for Ventana al conocimiento