Sir Arthur Eddington, the man who demonstrated relativity

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington was probably Britain’s best-known astronomer between 1918 and 1944. One of the great pioneers of stellar physics, it was Eddington who first realised the enormous importance of radiation pressure within stars. A great supporter of Einstein’s theories, Eddington became famous in 1919 when he used the total eclipse of that year to test one of the predictions in the General Theory of Relativity, namely that a powerful gravitational field could change the course of a beam of light. Photographs taken during totality of the 1919 eclipse, compared with pictures of exactly the same star field without the Sun’s presence, showed that stars appearing very close to the solar limb were, indeed, bent inwards by the amount predicted by Einstein. This lecture will look at the life and achievement of this remarkable British scientist.

Back to conference programme

 

About Allan Chapman

Allan Chapman is a historian of science at Oxford University with a special interest in the history of astronomy. He is the author of 11 books and over 110 journal articles, including Mary Somerville and the World of Science (Canopus, 2004) and England’s Leonardo: Robert Hooke and the seventeenth century scientific revolution (Institute of Physics, 2005), both subjects of previous AstroFest talks. He has made several history of astronomy programmes for television. In 2004 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Central Lancashire for his work in the history of astronomy. His book The Victorian Amateur Astronomer (1998) will soon be appearing in a revised edition.