Arthur Eddington

In the case of these proofs, some of which are, you know, are in excess of, you know, five hundred, eight hundred pages, and it's not uncommon in mathematics.

I mean, first of all, it reminds me of what Einstein said, you know, when they made the 1919 eclipse expedition, the Eddington expedition, to see if the-

Yes

...

So this all happened in 1915.

Sir Arthur Eddington.

Probably the world's first astrophysicist, if you wanted to.

We have astronomers up until him.

So we lose Vulcan.

We gain the confidence in the general theory of relativity.

It's all because of Sir Arthur Eddington, a brilliant physicist.

I think he was from Cambridge, Cambridge, England, at University of Cambridge.

And now, your comments on last week's episode on the great American eclipse.

Martin Kettling asks whether a DIY of Arthur Eddington's confirmation of general relativity would be possible.

Well, the answer is yes, but it ain't easy.

Eddington measured the very slight offset in the positions of stars around the limb, the edge, of the sun due to the paths of their light bending in the sun's gravitational field.

And here is a really interesting result.

Eddington got to one over 137 and then he got a bit overconfident.

But, you know, I put a quote by Feynman as the thing here whereby this is one of the most magical numbers we've ever seen.

And if we have a derivation of it, fantastic.

And so you have to ask, well, is that true? And so Bertrand Russell in 1927 first asked this question in The Analysis of Matter.

Same with Arthur Eddington in The Nature of the Physical World, 1928.

These guys were working through the implications of general relativity.

Russell makes the simple and clear observation that physics tells you what matter does, but it does not tell you what matter is.

And in 1958, he died in a hospital in Zurich, in room 137.

The astronomer Arthur Eddington went further and claimed to prove it was exactly 1 over 136.

And when the measurements moved, he found a reason to add 1.

So people started calling him Sir Arthur Adding 1.

She actually got interested late in her academic career in Cambridge in astronomy.

And it would be Arthur Eddington's lecture at Cambridge about the Eddington Eclipse, which is a very famous eclipse in 1919.

That would be the first practical experiment to prove one aspect of Einstein's theory of relativity.

When she came here to Harvard, she would actually have a scholarship as well.