I can only imagine readers were perplexed by this announcement, which seems at pains to tell everyone that (a) no one understands what has happened but (b) you don't need to worry about it. The New York Times, on the other hand, was more bombastic that clear. The Illustrated London News did a fairly good job of explaining what the astronomers were looking for. The announcement by Eddington and Dyson caught the world's attention and newspapers struggled to make sense of the discovery. You can see that the stars are incredibly dim and hard to spot even when pointed out. It has been scanned, and the stars that he was measuring are circled and labeled. This is one of Eddington's original photos of the eclipse. It is considered unlikely any advanced life exists on the planet, but anything is possible. Scientists now know that at least one of the stars within the cluster has three planets, one roughly the size and composition of the Earth. The light from the Hyades had been traveling about 153 years when it reached Eddington's telescope. The eclipse observation teams arrived with telescopes, cameras, glass photographic plates, developer chemicals, motors, clocks, waterproof tents and more. The drought was beginning to lessen in 1919, but the region was struggling.
What can only be called concentration camps were established and people were forced to live in them, as seen here. Many of those who survived fled the region, but the government feared they would cause instability if they arrived in Brazil's cities. Northern Brazil, meanwhile, had been struck by a devastating drought in 1915 that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
It is unclear in 1919 if Eddington saw free or enslaved laborers at work. The Portugese government promised to stamp out the practice, but political instability meant that these efforts received little attention. Some fifteen years before Eddington arrived, the world learned that the cocoa plantations in Príncipe, which primarily supplied Cadbury's Chocolate, were worked by enslaved laborers kidnapped from Angola. Eddington was amazed at the lush landscape and tropical fruits he ate about a dozen bananas a day. Príncipe is a gorgeous tropical island with misty mountains and white beaches. One went to Sobral in northern Brazil and the other to Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea. This graphic tries to represent this concept.Įddington arranged for two expeditions to view the 1919 eclipse. One of the problems with most explanations of relativity theory, including my own, is that they imply that massive objects sit on top of space. The Earth orbits the Sun because it is caught in the well of the Sun's gravity. The amount of the curvature depends on the mass of the object, so the Sun will cause greater curvature than the Earth. In this image, as in many, COs were depicted as unmanly cowards-as "sissies" with a major dose of homophobia.Įinstein's General Theory of Relativity describes space as curving in response to the mass of heavy objects.
Men would be tied up to a fixed object for up to two hours a day.Ĭonscientious objectors were despised by the general public and often mocked in political cartoons. Field punishment was introduced in 1881 following the abolition of flogging in the Army-so I guess that's a good thing? The punishment was applied to soldiers who disobeyed orders, which included COs who had been denied official status and continued to refuse to fight. Some COs were subjected to field punishment. This prisoner is standing on a stool to get a glimpse of the sky. Many were sent to solitary confinement, while others were put to hard labor. Eddington faced the greatest challenge of his life: proving his opposition to violence and his dedication to science were both a matter of conscience.Ĭonscientious objectors in Britain could be sent to prison if their claims were rejected by local tribunals.
But the British Army was determined to send him to the Front. Arthur Eddington was committed to testing Einstein's General Theory of Relativity during the 1919 Solar Eclipse, not only to remove all doubts about the theory but also to demonstrate the value of scientific internationalism.