Blog Ekkehard Friebe

Mit Bezug auf den Beitrag:
Henning Lundsgart: “The Theory of Relativity – a mistake build on wrong precondition”
bringe ich nachstehend eine weitere Arbeit von Henning Lundsgart, Dänemark 2005.

Zitat:

Eclipse 1919
In Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 271-290, 1999.  892-3310 / 99 is found a very interesting article about the eclipse, which took place May 29, 1919, and which made Einstein world-famous overnight. It is written by Ian McCausland and the title is: “Anomalies in the History of Relativity”.

Here is briefly, what the article brings to light:
The First World War lasted from 1914 until the end of 1918 and the peace with Germany was signed June 28, 1919 (The Treaty of Versailles). But already in March 1917 the Astronomer Royal of Britain, Sir Watson Dyson, suggested that the total eclipse of the Sun that was to take place on May 29, 1919, would present an excellent opportunity to test the prediction of The General Theory of Relativity, that light would be bent by a gravitational field. Dyson undertook the organization of the eclipse expeditions, but did not go to observe the eclipse himself. It was Professor Arthur Stanley Eddington who became the leader of the eclipse expeditions.

Incidentally he was knighted in 1930. Eddington is said to be a pacifist and that he was deferred from military service in the first world war “with the express stipulation that if the war should end by May 1919, then Eddington should undertake to lead an expedition for the purpose of verifying Einstein’s prediction!”. Eddington happened to lead two expeditions, of which the one went to Brazil, weil the other, in which Eddington himself took part, went to the island Principe in the Gulf of Guinea.

The deflection predicted by Einstein (1916) was very small, being about 1.7 seconds of arc for a ray of light at the edge of the Sun, and inversely proportional to the radial distance from the centre of the Sun. Non of those stars, for which measurements were made during the eclipse, were within two solar radii of the centre. The largest deflection occurred according to the theory would therefore have been less than 0.8 seconds of arc, which, for the 343-cm focal length of the telescope used by Eddington, would have corresponded to about 0.01 mm on the photograph. In addition, there were other technical difficulties because of having to transport telescopes to remote locations. For example, light from the stars was reflected by a mirror into the telescope, so that the mirror could be rotated to compensate for the rotation of the earth during a time exposure, instead of rotating the telescope, which was not feasible under the conditions of the eclipse expeditions.

Of possible sources of error was named:
    1.  Refraction of light in the Sun’s corona and/or in the earth’s atmosphere.
    2.  Distortions in the optical system caused by temperature changes during the eclipse.
    3.  Changes of scale between the eclipse plates and the comparison plates.
    4.  Distortions in the photographic emulsion while drying.
    5.  Errors in measurement of the images on the plates.

In modern telescopes corresponding to those, present on the eclipse expeditions, but supposedly of a better quality, the possibilities to make accurate observations are estimated like this (MacRobert, 1995):  “Viewed at high power from the bottom of our ocean of air, a star is a living thing. It jumps, quivers, and ripples tirelessly, and swells into a ball of steady fuzz. Rare is the night (at most sites) when any telescope, no matter how large its aperture or perfect its optics, can resolve details finer than 1 arc second. More typical at ordinary locations is 2- or 3-arc-second seeing, og worse.”

However, measurements of the actual deflections on the plates may have introduced some errors in view of the extremely small displacements involved. In addition, the weather was cloudy at Principe at the time of the eclipse. And the Astronomer Royal, Sir Frank Dyson, reported at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society on July 11, 1919, that he had a letter from Prof. Eddington, that obviously expressed greatly disappointment. Though he had secured 16 photographs, but only for the last six was the sky clear enough to show any stars; and, as the sky was generally only clear on one part of the plate at a time, the stars secured on the plates are badly distributed. From his best plate, however, he has some evidence of deflection in the Einstein sense, but the plate errors have yet to be fully determined.

Eddington’s biographer Professor A. Vibert Douglas (1957), has also described his measurement of that plate: From Eddington’s Notebook (June 3) it appears that he spent the whole day measuring, and the one plate measured gave a result agreeing with Einstein. Douglas’s biography continued with the statement that “This was a moment which Eddington never forgot. On one occasion in later years he referred to it as the greatest moment of his life!”

(Zitatende)

Lesen Sie bitte hier weiter!

Beste Grüße Ekkehard Friebe