Beautiful Mind....Sir Albert Einstein

The year 2005 was celebrated the world over as the centenary of the discovery of the special theory of relativity by Albert Einstein. Although Einstein published three major results during 1905, he became famous only 14 years later, or after November 6,1919. The Einstein story is an absorbing account of how a scientific achievement aught the popular imagination and made international headlines.
It all began with Isaac Newton, who, while propounding his universal law of gravitation, wondered whether like all material objects in the universe, light is subject to gravitational attraction. Would a ray of light skirting a massive body, bend its path? This was the question Newton posed, but did not answer, perhaps because he felt that the effect, if any, would be too small to measure with the techniques available to him.
In 1801, Johann von Soldner carried out a calculation by assuming that a light ray was made of tiny particles (Newton had called them corpuscles) which would be attracted by the massive body. It would, therefore, tend the ray slightly. How lightly? A ray of light from a distant star passing by the sun would be bent by an angle less than four thousandth part of a degree. This conclusion was of academic interest since astronomers if the day were not capable if measuring the effect.
After proposing special relativity, Einstein undertook he more ambitious task of introducing a general theory of relativity that incorporated n it the phenomenon of gravity. His early attempts led him to the conclusion no different from Soldner's so far as the tending of light was concerned. By 1911, he felt confident of his new theory and urged astronomers to verify it.
The astronomers, too, were by this time confident of being able to make the required measurements. This meant checking if the direction of a star changed slightly when it passing behind the Sun. But how does we see a star so close to the Sun? The answer is, when the Sun is totally eclipsed.
Total solar eclipses are rare events visible on very limited zones on the Earth. In 1912, Argentinean astronomers went to Brazil to make the measurements, only to be thwarted by a cloudy sky. A second attempt by German astronomers in 1914 to observe the eclipse in Crimea was prevented by the onset of the First World War. Nevertheless, these aborted attempts turned out to be fortunate from Einstein's point of view.
By 1915 he realized that he had made a mistake in his calculations and the revised theory, now called the general theory of relativity, gave an answer that was double what he had got earlier; that is, a bending
Angle twice that given by Soldner based on Newton's theory.
General relativity was a highly mathe¬matical theory, beyond the grasp of most astronomers. Very few scientists at the time fully appreciated its notions of curved space and time. Fortunately for Einstein, though, there was one astronomer who did: Arthur Stanley Edenton at Cambridge, England. Eddington pressed for an expedition to measure this effect during the eclipse due in 1919. For better chance of success, two spots were proposed for observation, one in Sobral in Brazil and the other in the island of Principe in Spanish Guinea in Africa. Eddington, a quaker, faced the hurdle of possible conscription and deten¬tion, but his colleagues made sure that did not happen.
The war ended in 1918, leaving very little time for completing the preparations. The team going to Sobral led by Greenwich astronomer Crommelin had taken large 10-inch lenses for accurate observations. However, the two makeshift telescopes made from them developed technical problems and in the end Crommelin had to fall back on a four-inch telescope. Eddington had opted for Principe as it had a better weather record, but it turned rainy and cloudy on the day. Fortunately, the cloud cover cleared at the right time for Eddington to take the necessary photographs. He needed to take some photo¬graphs of the star-field after the experiment for compari¬son, but couldn't because a local strike of steamship operators forced him to return home early. Despite all these problems, the data were analysed and presented on November 6,1919 at the Royal Society in London, to a crowded hall of scientists against the backdrop of a portrait of Isaac Newton. Would the results show him (and Soldner) to be right or will the new (and weird) theory of Einstein be favoured? The suspense was broken by Astronomer Royal Sir Frank Dyson whose account, followed by reports from Eddington and Crommelin, upheld Eins¬tein's prediction. The audience felt the thrill of history being made.
Despite the euphoria, several scientists were sceptical and would have liked more data. They were right. The observational errors were much larger than realised at the time and did not warrant a clear-cut judgment on that day. Only in the 1970s did astronomers using radio and micro¬wave observations obtain a clear decision in favour of Einstein.
Hindsight informs us that luck inter¬vened on several occasions during the episode. Einstein's earlier wrong prediction escaped detection. Be that as it may, the 1919 meeting consecrated Einstein as the greatest scientist of the last century.





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