Eddington's eclipse and Einstein's celebrity

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 31 December 2018

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Philip Ball's tale is of a solar eclipse 100 years ago observed by Arthur Eddington, a British astronomer who travelled to the remote island of Principe off the coast of West Africa and saw the stars shift in the heavens. His observations supplied the crucial proof of a theory that transformed our notions of the cosmos and turned a German physicist named Albert Einstein into an international celebrity. But this is also a tale of how a Quaker tried to use science to unite countries. The reparations imposed on Germany after the war extended into science too as many in Great Britain and other Allied nations felt that German science should be ostracised from the international community. As a Quaker, Eddington wanted just the opposite: to see peaceful cooperation restored among nations. Picture: Image of the 1919 Solar eclipse taken by Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), Credit: Science Photo Library Producer: Erika Wright

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Doleepa, and I'm at your service.
0:04.7	Join me as I serve up personal conversations
0:07.1	with my sensational guests.
0:08.9	Do a leap, interviews, Tim Cook.
0:11.2	Technology doesn't want to be good or bad.
0:15.0	It's in the hands of the Creator.
0:16.7	It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room.
0:20.6	If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes, you're
0:24.7	doing the wrong thing.
0:25.9	Julie, at your service.
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0:31.2	Welcome to Discovery from the BBC. I'm Philip Ball and this is the science story of Arthur Eddington.
0:39.0	In a room packed with scientific luminaries a hundred years ago, there's an excited buzz
0:45.0	over what is about to be revealed. According to one distinguished observer,
0:50.0	the whole atmosphere of tense interest was exactly like that of the Greek drama.
0:56.4	They were about to find out if an expedition that had crossed the world during that summer
1:00.9	of 1919 and brought back observations of the stars
1:05.4	could verify an extraordinary theory about gravity, space and time
1:10.9	and the nature of the entire universe. The expedition was led by the British
1:16.4	astronomer Arthur Eddington and he was on a mission. Partly it was a scientific quest
1:22.2	during a solar eclipse he had seen the stars shift in the heavens.
1:28.0	His observations would put to the test what many physicists now consider to be the most beautiful theory ever, Albert
	...

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