Page 201 - A Life - my Live - my path

My Ariadne’s thread: Science

They focused on the Hyades cluster. This large cluster of
400 stars, some 150 light-years away, was at that time
orbiting the Sun.
Since the laws of Johannes KEPPLER (1571-1630, German
astronomer and physicist), published between 1604 and 1618, we
have been able to calculate the position of a planet or star
with a high degree of precision.
Observations showed that the lights of these stars were not
in their usual place, but were hidden by the sun. These lights,
which had travelled 150 years, had been diverted just before
their arrival on Earth by the sun's gravitational pull.
They were able to see and take pictures of these stars which
- according to Newtonian logic - were not visible.

EINSTEIN had calculated this deflection 165
The experiment had proved the point.
This statement will go down in the history books because, on
the one hand, it was the demonstration by experiment that
EINSTEIN's theories on general relativity were correct and,
on the other, because of the context in which it was made.
We were just coming out of the 1914-1918 war, and it was the
English who were asserting that EINSTEIN's theories (of
German origin) were correct and verified. The New York Times
published these results. Virtually overnight, EINSTEIN
becomes the most famous scientist of all time.

165 A light deflection of 1.6 arc seconds for EDDINGTON and 1.98 arc seconds for
MICHELSON. EINSTEIN had theoretically predicted a deflection of 1.75 arc
seconds. These extremely low angles are similar to those of a 10-inch touch-
sensitive tablet observed 30 km away.
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