Lights all askew in the Heavens – the 1919 Eclipse Expeditions

I completely forgot to upload the slides from my talk at the Open Meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society on April 12 2019 so here they are now!

Just a reminder that the centenary of the famous 1919 Eclipse Expeditions is on 29 May 2019.

2 Responses to “Lights all askew in the Heavens – the 1919 Eclipse Expeditions”

  1. Could you explain how light-bending in a gravitational field is predicted in Newtonian physics? I don’t understand the Soldner calculation for a particle of zero mass
    P.S. The photo of Einstein and Edd is from 1930!

    • telescoper's avatar
      telescoper Says:

      That’s a point I made in the talk – it’s anyone’s guess what happens if the photon is actually massless but if it has a non-zero but vanishingly small mass it’s calculable.

      Of course if you use E=mc^2 then you have a justification but that’s equivalent to just using the time-time component of the field equation, i.e. it ignores the space-space component.

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