A Memory of Dunsink
Just time for an early morning post before I get the train in order to attend the second day of this year’s Irish National Astronomy Meeting at Dunsink Observatory (in the above picture, which I took yesterday morning). Incidentally, Dunsink Observatory is Réadlann Dhún Sinche in the Irish language.
Thinking about this meeting ahead of the event reminded me of a loose end, which I managed to tidy up this week.
Once upon a time, before the pandemic, I was involved in various events to celebrate the centenary of the famous eclipse expeditions of May 1919 which had a strong connection with Dunsink Observatory (see e.g. here). Among these things was an invitation to write a paper on the subject, which appeared in Contemporary Physics in June 2019.
Contemporary Physics being a commercial journal the paper was published behind a paywall. The publication rules however allowed the paper to be made freely available after an embargo period of one year.
I had intended to put the paper on arXiv in June 2020 when the embargo period lapsed, but at that point Covid-19 had taken hold, my workload went through the roof and I forgot about it until this week when a combination of my forthcoming trip to Dunsink and the appearance of my student’s first paper on arXiv conspired to remind me. Finally, therefore, the paper has now appeared in a fully open-access form on the arXiv here, just over two years later.
The title is A Revolution in Science: the Eclipse Expeditions of 1919 and the abstract reads:
Follow @telescoperThe first direct experimental test of Einstein’s theory of general relativity involved a pair of expeditions to measure the bending of light at a total solar eclipse that took place one hundred years ago, on 29 May 1919. So famous is this experiment, and so dramatic was the impact on Einstein himself, that history tends not to recognise the controversy that surrounded the results at the time. In this article, I discuss the experiment in its scientific and historical background context and explain why it was, and is, such an important episode in the development of modern physics.
In the Dark 
September 2, 2022 at 1:20 pm
it’s a very good article but I found the abstract is a bit misleading. There isn’t that much about contemporaneous reactions to the 1919 experiment and just one reference (that I noticed) to the vast secondary literature on this topic by authors such as Crelinstin, Kennefick and Stanley. (I also didn’t see any mention of the well-known accusations of Collins and Finch – much as I disagree with their thesis, it’s surely worth mentioning if only as an example of what happens when the history of physics is written by those with no knowledge of physics). Perhaps it’s just a question of journal, I can’t help thinking that a journal more concerned with the history of science would have urged the hapless author to give a little info on contemporaneous reactions to the experiment in the wider astronomical community, especially in the US …
September 27, 2023 at 9:55 am
[…] later renamed Grubb Parsons after its relocation to Newcastle upon Tyne. I’ve posted about other connections too. The presence of this telescope in Barcelona is further evidence – as if it were needed […]