No Shadow of a Doubt: the 1919 eclipse that confirmed Einstein's theory of relativity
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On their 100th anniversary, the story of the extraordinary scientific expeditions that ushered in the era of relativity In 1919, British scientists led extraordinary expeditions to Brazil and Africa to test Albert Einstein's revolutionary new theory of general relativity in what became the century's most celebrated scientific experiment. The result ushered in a new era and made Einstein a global celebrity by confirming his dramatic prediction that the path of light rays would be bent by gravity. Today, Einstein's theory is scientific fact. Yet the effort to "weigh light" by measuring the gravitational deflection of starlight during the May 29, 1919, solar eclipse has become clouded by myth and skepticism. Could Arthur Eddington and Frank Dyson have gotten the results they claimed? Did the pacifist Eddington falsify evidence to foster peace after a horrific war by validating the theory of a German antiwar campaigner? In No Shadow of a Doubt, Daniel Kennefick provides definitive answers by offering the most comprehensive and authoritative account of how expedition scientists overcame war, bad weather, and equipment problems to make the experiment a triumphant success. The reader follows Eddington on his voyage to Africa through his letters home, and delves with Dyson into how the complex experiment was accomplished, through his notes. Other characters include Howard Grubb, the brilliant Irishman who made the instruments; William Campbell, the American astronomer who confirmed the result; and Erwin Findlay-Freundlich, the German whose attempts to perform the test in Crimea were foiled by clouds and his arrest. By chronicling the expeditions and their enormous impact in greater detail than ever before, No Shadow of a Doubt reveals a story that is even richer and more exciting than previously known.
The Circulation of Astronomical Knowledge in the Ancient World
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Astronomical and astrological knowledge circulated in many ways in the ancient world: in the form of written texts and through oral communication; by the conscious assimilation of sought-after knowledge and the unconscious absorption of ideas to which scholars were exposed. The Circulation of Astronomical Knowledge in the Ancient World explores the ways in which astronomical knowledge circulated between different communities of scholars over time and space, and what was done with that knowledge when it was received. Examples are discussed from Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Greco-Roman world, India, and China.
A More Perfect Heaven: how Copernicus revolutionized the cosmos
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By 1514, the reclusive cleric Nicolaus Copernicus had written and hand-copied an initial outline of his heliocentric theory-in which he defied common sense and received wisdom to place the sun, not the earth, at the center of our universe, and set the earth spinning among the other planets. Over the next two decades, Copernicus expanded his theory through hundreds of observations, while compiling in secret a book-length manuscript that tantalized mathematicians and scientists throughout Europe. For fear of ridicule, he refused to publish. In 1539, a young German mathematician, Georg Joachim Rheticus, drawn by rumors of a revolution to rival the religious upheaval of Martin Luther's Reformation, traveled to Poland to seek out Copernicus. Two years later, the Protestant youth took leave of his aging Catholic mentor and arranged to have Copernicus's manuscript published, in 1543, asDe revolutionibus orbium coelestium(On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres)-the book that forever changed humankind's place in the universe. In her elegant, compelling style, Dava Sobel chronicles, as nobody has, the conflicting personalities and extraordinary discoveries that shaped the Copernican Revolution. At the heart of the book is her playAnd the Sun Stood Still, imagining Rheticus's struggle to convince Copernicus to let his manuscript see the light of day. As she achieved with her bestsellersLongitude andGalileo's Daughter, Sobel expands the bounds of narration, giving us an unforgettable portrait of scientific achievement, and of the ever-present tensions between science and faith.
The Story of Astronomy
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Trace the development of astronomy from early Greek stargazers to the ambitious pioneers: Brahe, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton - who braved persecution and ridicule to fight for a science that relied not on ancient authorities and scriptures, but on logic, math, and careful observation. As Motz and Weaver show, the fruits of this noble pursuit - the elegant, simple natural laws - opened our eyes to the elusive rotations of the heavenly bodies, and gave rise to classical physics, and, finally, the vigorous, thriving science of astronomy today. These engaging authors go on to depict the brilliant revolution in astronomy that shattered classical physics and transformed our concepts of time, space, and matter. Beginning with Einstein's theory of relativity, Motz and Weaver celebrate and savor the twentieth century's greatest advances in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, each of which have dramatically reshaped modern astronomy.
The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy
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Carefully organized and generously illustrated, the book can teach readers how to do real astronomy using the methods of ancient astronomers.
Metztli icualoca: lunar eclipse. Florentine Codex, Book 7, Folio 7r.
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 7: The Sun, Moon and Stars", fol. 7r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/7/folio/7r/images/0
Eclipse from Johannes de Sacra Bosco's, De Sphaera Mundi.
De Sphaera Mundi (Sphere of the World) was an early 13th c. astronomical text who's title establishes that it was well known at the time that the world was a sphere and not flat. Johannes de Sacra Boscos work include illustrations that demonstrate the curvature of the earth and how eclipses work.
“De eclipsi lunae,” The College of Physicians of Philadelphia Digital Library, accessed March 15, 2024, https://cppdigitallibrary.org/items/show/2412. Reused under non-commercial rights attribution.
1795 Almanac, by mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker.
"Containing the motions of the sun and Moon; the true places and aspects of the planets; the rising and setting of the sun; rising, setting, and southing of the moon; the lunations, conjunctions, and eclipses; and the rising, setting and southing of the planets and noted fixed stars."
Benjamin Banneker and Us : eleven generations of an American family
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A family reunion gives way to an unforgettable genealogical quest as relatives reconnect across lines of color, culture, and time, putting the past into urgent conversation with the present. In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired a Black man to help survey Washington, DC. That man was Benjamin Banneker, an African American mathematician, a writer of almanacs, and one of the greatest astronomers of his generation. Banneker then wrote what would become a famous letter to Jefferson, imploring the new president to examine his hypocrisy, as someone who claimed to love liberty yet was an enslaver. More than two centuries later, Rachel Jamison Webster, an ostensibly white woman, learns that this groundbreaking Black forefather is also her distant relative. Acting as a storyteller, Webster draws on oral history and conversations with her DNA cousins to imagine the lives of their shared ancestors across eleven generations, among them Banneker's grandparents, an interracial couple who broke the law to marry when America was still a conglomerate of colonies under British rule. These stories shed light on the legal construction of race and display the brilliance and resistance of early African Americans in the face of increasingly unjust laws, some of which are still in effect in the present day.
