Special Relativity was the theory to explain the results of the Michelson Morley Experiment from 20 years earlier that everyone else ignored because it made them uncomfortable and didn’t want to do the math.
The relativistic model was demonstrated to better describe the transit of Venus than Newtonian mechanics. It had been quickly proposed as a good test, was generally accepted as the crucial experiment, and all of this happened very fast.
Another one was GPS: They had prepared two sets of maths for the satellites, Newtonian and relativistic. They started operating them with the Newtonian model, and the satellites went out of sync, nothing really worked. Then they flipped the switch to relativistic, and everything worked flawlessly.
Even before that they took an atomic clock, put it on a plane, and flew it around the earth to later compare to one that stayed on earth. They differed by the expected fraction of a fraction of a millisecond.
Neither of those two could be done right when Einstein proposed relativity, but experiments like that could already be envisioned, “move a sufficiently precise clock sufficiently fast and compare it to a stationary one” is kind of a no-brainer. That’s not the case with string theory, noone has any idea how to test any of it.
OTOH, physics shouldn’t feel bad about that stuff. E.g. number theory is notorious for results which are considered useless even by the people formulating them, only for an application to appear a century or two later.
I was under the impression it wasn’t proven until space probes proved light redshifts near the sun when pointed at earth or the gravitational wave discovery
Yeah the funding necessary for large scale gravitational wave research wouldn’t have been forthcoming unless everybody had been convinced GR was the best description available for decades.
Einstein predicted gravity waves but didn’t expect we’d ever have the technology to measure them.
The same was true of relativity
Special Relativity was the theory to explain the results of the Michelson Morley Experiment from 20 years earlier that everyone else ignored because it made them uncomfortable and didn’t want to do the math.
The relativistic model was demonstrated to better describe the transit of Venus than Newtonian mechanics. It had been quickly proposed as a good test, was generally accepted as the crucial experiment, and all of this happened very fast.
Another one was GPS: They had prepared two sets of maths for the satellites, Newtonian and relativistic. They started operating them with the Newtonian model, and the satellites went out of sync, nothing really worked. Then they flipped the switch to relativistic, and everything worked flawlessly.
Even before that they took an atomic clock, put it on a plane, and flew it around the earth to later compare to one that stayed on earth. They differed by the expected fraction of a fraction of a millisecond.
Neither of those two could be done right when Einstein proposed relativity, but experiments like that could already be envisioned, “move a sufficiently precise clock sufficiently fast and compare it to a stationary one” is kind of a no-brainer. That’s not the case with string theory, noone has any idea how to test any of it.
OTOH, physics shouldn’t feel bad about that stuff. E.g. number theory is notorious for results which are considered useless even by the people formulating them, only for an application to appear a century or two later.
Source?
It was actually Mercury, and Einstein himself proposed it.
Thank you, I’ve got a lot of reading to do
Primarily, Frank Watson Dyson and Arthur Stanley Eddington.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment
I’ve got some reading to do, thank you.
I was under the impression it wasn’t proven until space probes proved light redshifts near the sun when pointed at earth or the gravitational wave discovery
Yeah the funding necessary for large scale gravitational wave research wouldn’t have been forthcoming unless everybody had been convinced GR was the best description available for decades.
Einstein predicted gravity waves but didn’t expect we’d ever have the technology to measure them.
Was