The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [80]
At a dinner soon after his return to England, Eddington entertained some fellow astronomers with a poem in the style of the Rubáiyát. “One thing is certain, and the rest debate—light-rays, when near the Sun, DO NOT GO STRAIGHT” was his rousing finale. In November the results of the expedition were officially reported at a special joint meeting in London of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society. Dyson spoke on behalf of the participants and behind him, almost like a stage setting, hung a picture of Isaac Newton, whose historic law of gravitation was undergoing its first modification. The best results supporting Einstein came from the Sobral 4-inch telescope. From its plates, the Britishers measured a starlight deflection of 1.98 arcseconds, a little on the high side of Einstein's prediction. The poorer images from Principe suggested a bending of 1.61 arcseconds, just below what Einstein calculated. Viewed together, though, Einstein was deemed a winner. These were the results that Eddington and Dyson stressed in their reports, which were widely hailed in newspaper headlines worldwide, turning Einstein into an overnight celebrity. “LIGHTS ALL ASKEW IN THE HEAVENS, Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations… Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to be, but Nobody Need Worry,” blared the New York Times. Suddenly the public's attention was riveted to all things relative. Awed by the contributions scientists had made in the war effort, the public was highly receptive to hear more from the physics frontier—at least until their attention was diverted by the tomb of a young Egyptian pharaoh named Tutankhamen (“King Tut”) found a few years later almost completely intact.
Often neglected in the recountings of the famous 1919 solar-eclipse expedition was the team's largest data set from the Sobral astrographic telescope, which indicated a deflection of 0.93 arcseconds, in favor of Sir Isaac Newton. Because of various technical problems with the Sobral scope, including a blurring of its images, the British team decided to downplay that instrument's results. Eddington admitted he was unscientifically rooting for Einstein, but his instincts to reject the astrographic telescope results turned out to be good in the end. Campbell headed up another solar-eclipse expedition in 1922, which arrived at similar results and further confirmed Einstein's theory. When asked what he had been expecting, Campbell replied in all seriousness, “I hoped it would not be true.” Relativity's thoroughly new vision of space and time, coupled with its complexity, made even several leading scientists reluctant to accept its predictions. Those primarily trained in classical physics were quite leery of general relativity's strange outlook on the force of gravity and wondered if the light-bending was actually a refraction effect in the Sun's atmosphere or perhaps was due to a physical distortion of the photographic plate from imaging the hot solar corona. Heber Curtis, who met Einstein during his first visit to the United States, was certainly no fan of relativity. “We met in quick succession Their Eminences, the Prince of Monaco, Dr. Einstein and President Harding, and were photographed in a group on the White House lawn,” Curtis wrote Campbell soon after the meeting. Curtis, who was still convinced he had proven Einstein wrong with his flawed 1918 expedition results, would have been glad to see someone join him in overturning Einstein. “He surely looks like the fourth dimension!” joked Curtis about the German phenom. “Face is somewhat sallow and yellowish, redeemed by very keen bright eyes. But wears his hair