Einstein, Eddington, and Eclipse

Maxwell Hall, room 101

“Lights All Askew In the Heavens”, ” Einstein Theory Triumphs”, so it reports in the New York Times on Monday, 11.10.1919, 4 days after the publication of findings obtained by an expedition led by the British physicist Arthur Eddington. In May 1919, he organized an expedition to Sobral in Brazil and the Island of Principe to observe a total solar eclipse. The result formed one of the earliest confirmations of Einstein’s general relativity over the Newtonian law of gravity. Throughout the history and across many cultures, special celestial events like this have functioned not only as a source of entertainment and religious inspiration, but also as a decisive test for astronomical theories and models. We demonstrate why the eclipse constitutes a unique event to test Einstein’s theory of relativity and illustrate how this uniqueness also requires a huge undertaking among scientists.