This picture of the solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, is not only beautiful but also scientifically important. It was taken by British scientist Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), and was the first physical test of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
Of course, in retrospect, over 100 years later it might seem obvious that massive objects distort space-time. But Einstein’s paper with the mathematics that posited this had only come out in 1915. Challenging Newton’s ideas about gravity, Einstein’s theories also faced anti-German backlash by the British and Americans because of the First World War. But Arthur Eddington was a pacifist who refused to fight due to his Quaker religious grounds and who was driven from a young age by a passion for studying the stars.
In fact, Eddington was the first person to hypothesize about the ways stars produced energy, anticipating ideas about nuclear fusion well before much knowledge about the physical composition of stars was known.
And with his eyes on the stars and above the xenophobic lines of nationalism, Eddington set off to an island off the west coast of Africa in May of 1919 to check out the total solar eclipse. He knew that if Einstein were correct, the mass of the sun would cause light from far-off stars in its trajectory to bend, so that the stars would appear to be in a different part of the sky. The idea, of course, could be tested during a total solar eclipse when the stars would be visible in the daytime sky.
And Eddington, and Einstein, were correct. 100 years later, in 2016, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) again proved the General Theory of Relativity when it detected gravitational waves. Eddington made other contributions to astronomy, but was most famous as a science communicator, becoming one of Britain’s most esteemed public scientists of the first half of the 20th century.
Sources: See Wikipedia entry for Arthus Eddington. Also “Studying the stars, testing relativity: Sir Arthur Eddington” The European Space Agency.
