ABSTRACT
German Empire, but as the year of the overthrow of Newton’s law of gravitation. The British astrono mers who went to Africa to observe the eclipse of the sun May 29, 1919, came back with the proof that a ray of light passing close by the sun is bent out pf its straight course. The photographs taken during the six minutes when the sun was shadowed show the surrounding stars in different positions from where they are seen when the sun’s disk is not in their midst. This is the second time that Einstein has scored over Newton. The first was in regard to the orbit of Mercury. If the sun and Mercury were alone in the universe the planet, according to Newton’s law, would revolve forever around the sun in the same elliptical track. But the presence of the other planets makes Mercury deviate from this regular route, so the ellipse it describes is never quite the same but slowly shifts around so that in the course of centuries its longer diameter would be pointing in a different direction. Calculating by Newton’s law, the influence exerted by the other planets, astrono mers found that it would shift the orbit of Mercury 532 seconds of arc in a century. But when they took observations on Mercury they found that its orbit was shifting at the rate of 574 seconds. The discrep ancy between observation and theory, 42 seconds, is
thirty times greater than could be accounted for by errors of instruments or observation. But according to Einstein’s theory, if the sun and Mercury were alone in space with no other planets interfering, the orbit of Mercury would not remain the same, but would advance at the rate of 43 seconds a century. This, as the reader will observe, is in substantial agreement with the discrepancy which has for two centuries puzzled astronomers, since it was in explicable on the Newtonian theory.
