waiting for the sun...
Jacob Koshy -
Tuesday, July 21, 2009 12:18 AM
Going by the amount of media space that the moon landing anniversary generated, Albert Einstein will surely be a tad jealous. Folks, it
is 90 years--last May 20--since Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was proved right! Arthur Eddington, famous astronomer and supposedly the first true blue fan of the shock-haired, tongue-popping Einstein, traveled to a remote South African island to watch the total solar eclipse of 1919. Now,
one of Einstein's first predictions was that gravity bends star light.
Apparently, one of the practical ways to check that was to look at small stars
near the sun. Such observations required a night during the day, aka a total
solar eclipse.
Eddington saw that the sun indeed bent some starlight and
voila, Einstein was on his way to becoming Time Magazine’s Person of the
Century. Never mind that later critics accused Eddington of sexing up his
observations to suit Einstein’s result. Though few doubt Eddington’s honesty,
the verdict is out that his observations were of an extremely poor quality and
wouldn’t make it past today’s peer review.
There’s a DVD at home called Einstein and Eddington, that
I’ve yet to see.
When the moon’s shadow glides over Surat, Patna and the 3 Gorges Dam, god knows which great theory is being chiseled, fine tuned, or trashed. When astronomers tomorrow focus their lenses at the sun’s corona (the only reason why eclipses are of astronomical interest now) and we, the lesser people, marvel at the aesthetics, I wonder where the next Einstein is. (Hawking? He’s passé)
NB: Samanth adds: During yet another solar eclipse, this one in 1868, a French scientist named Pierre Janssen traveled to a tobacco field just outside Guntur, in Andhra Pradesh, to observe the solar spectrum. In it, he discovered a prominent yellow line that had not previously been observed in spectral readings. Janssen initially assumed that the line was generated in sodium's wavelength, but further investigation revealed that it was in fact an entirely new element. That same year, two other English scientists found the same line and named the new element "helium." Which was how helium became the first ever element to be detected outside Earth before it was discovered on Earth.