Source: Wikimediaįinlay-Freundlich himself attempted to verify this prediction by taking advantage of a solar eclipse in 1914, but the outbreak of World War I prevented it. If Einstein was right, the stars would appear in the sky slightly displaced from their expected position. But since the intense light of the Sun blinds us to the glimmer of the stars, this could only be done during an eclipse, when the occultation of the Sun by the Moon would make it possible to make out the twinkling stars in the sky. Shortly thereafter, one of Einstein’s collaborators, the German astronomer Erwin Finlay-Freundlich, challenged his colleagues: if Einstein’s model was correct, it should be possible to detect the deflection of the starlight that reaches us after skimming past the enormous mass of the Sun.
A few years later, Einstein would calculate a curvature twice as large as that predicted by Newtonian calculations. In fact, the effect was already suggested in Newton’s work, but Newton could not explain the enigma of gravity’s action at a distance. In this work he predicted that great masses were able to bend light. That year he published a study entitled “ Über den Einfluß der Schwerkraft auf die Ausbreitung des Lichtes“, or “On the influence of gravitation on the propagation of light”. His leap to immortality began to take shape in 1911, when he was working on the generalisation of relativity to gravitational fields to build a theory of gravity that modified that of Newton. His great reputation was forged in 1905, which today is considered the annus mirabilis or miraculous year in the history of the German, when he published revolutionary papers on four topics: Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, special relativity and the equivalence between mass and energy through the most famous equation in history: E = mc 2.īut at that time, Einstein was nothing more than a highly prestigious scientist, like so many others. He would still have to wait until 1921 to receive the Nobel Prize, but from the beginning of the decade he was already a recurring name in the Nobel nominations. In the second decade of the last century, Einstein had already achieved all the renown and recognition among his colleagues that any scientist could dream of.
However, beyond the immense value of his contributions to science, the fact that he has become an icon of popular culture is mainly due to a story that happened one hundred years ago, on May 29, 1919, whose main protagonist was the British astronomer Arthur Eddington. It would really be necessary to have grown up in a deep cave not to recognize both his name and his classic image. But it is clear that German scientist is much more. A poll by the journal Physics World exalted Albert Einstein as the greatest physicist in history.
0 kommentar(er)
