A century ago, Albert Einstein became famous.
Sure, he was already well-known among physicists. But the world at large learned his name only after November 1919, when news broke that his theory of gravity had been confirmed — to the dismay of many fans of Isaac Newton.
“Lights All Askew in the Heavens” shouted the headline in the New York Times. “Einstein Theory Triumphs,” a subhead added. As the article recounted, an observation of stars near the sun during a solar eclipse found their apparent position shifted just as Einstein had predicted. Newton’s law of gravity, considered inviolable for over two centuries, had been repealed.
The first major test of Einstein’s general theory of relativity came in 1919 from an eclipse, shown here in an image from the scientific paper reporting that light from distant stars was bent by the sun’s gravity just as Einstein’s theory had predicted. (Credit: F.W. Dyson, A.S. Eddington and C. Davidson)
