Is Technology Too Good for an Old-School Test of Einstein’s Relativity?

July 11, 2010 eclipse Image as viewed from Easter Island in the South Pacific. (Credits: Williams College Eclipse Expedition - Jay M. Pasachoff, Muzhou Lu, and Craig Malamut) On Aug. 21, sky-gazers from around the world will converge in the United States as a total solar eclipse charts a path from Oregon to South Carolina. In between, on Casper Mountain in Wyoming, you’ll find Don Bruns with his telescope. A retired physicist, Bruns is using the rare opportunity to test Albert Einstein's general relativity like Sir Arthur Eddington, who was the first scientist to test the theory back in 1919. At that time, Newton’s law of universal gravity was still vogue, but Einstein shook the status quo by introducing his theory of general relativity, which fused concepts of time and three-dimensional space into a four-dimensional continuum called space-time. According to Einstein, gravity wasn’t a force; instead, it was a distortion in the fabric of space-time.