Testing The Theory
The perihelion precession of Mercury was the first evidence that general relativity is correct. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington's 1919 expedition in which he confirmed Einstein's prediction for the deflection of light by the Sun during the total solar eclipse of 29 May 1919 helped to cement the status of general relativity as a likely true theory. Since then many observations have confirmed the correctness of general relativity. These include studies of binary pulsars, observations of radio signals passing the limb of the Sun, and even the GPS system.
Read more about this topic: History Of General Relativity
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“Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go.”
—Robert M. Pirsig (b. 1928)
“Today so much rebellion is aimless and demoralizing precisely because children have no values to challenge. Teenage rebellion is a testing process in which young people try out various values in order to make them their own. But during those years of trial, error, embarrassment, a child needs family standards to fall back on, reliable habits of thought and feeling that provide security and protection.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“There could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case.”
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955)