Relativity and reality

John Benton  |  Comment
Date posted:  1 Jun 2019
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Relativity and reality

Albert Einstein

We live in the age of relativism. It may not have started in 1919, but it certainly received a big fillip in that year.

It’s 100 years since the first experimental evidence confirmed Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and somehow, to the popular mind, that gave the signal that all of life is relative.

Special and General

Einstein Special Theory, published in 1905, uncovered the link between mass and energy. But his General Theory gave us a new way of seeing space and time. In particular it implied that the geometry of the universe is distorted by mass. On 29 May 1919, Arthur Eddington observed a solar eclipse from the small island of Principe, off the coast of West Africa. He took photographs which, he claimed after months of painstaking deliberation, showed that light from the distant Hyades cluster of stars, had been bent on passing the sun by 1.70 seconds of arc.

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