Picture this: May 29, 1919.A total solar eclipse is about to sweep across the Earth. While most people are simply marveling at the sudden darkness, two teams of British astronomers are racing against time on opposite sides of the planet — one on the remote island of Príncipe off West Africa, the other in Sobral, Brazil.Leading the charge is Sir Frank Dyson, the Astronomer Royal. Their mission? To photograph stars clustered near the edge of the Sun’s darkened disk and answer one of the biggest questions in physics.For years, Albert Einstein had predicted something astonishing: gravity doesn’t just pull on objects — it bends spacetime itself. As a result, starlight passing close to the Sun should be deflected by a tiny but measurable amount — exactly twice what Newton’s old theory of gravity predicted.During those precious minutes of totality, the teams captured the crucial plates. Back in England, after months of painstaking analysis, the results came in:The starlight had bent. Exactly as Einstein predicted.The news exploded across the world. Headlines screamed: “Einstein’s Theory Triumphs!” “Lights All Askew in the Heavens!” On November 6, 1919, at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society, the announcement was made. Einstein — then a relatively obscure German physicist — was catapulted into global stardom https://t.co/meAA07ao1U wasn’t just a victory for one man. It was the moment modern physics came of age. Newton’s 250-year reign was over, and a new understanding of the Universe — one where space and time are flexible, where black holes and gravitational waves became possible — had https://t.co/c20zOrrqGZ eclipse. Two distant expeditions. A handful of photographic plates.And the birth of a legend.
@DietmarPichler1 Add George Galloway and Scott Ritter to the list of supposed experts who have yet to catch the tail of an accurate analysis prediction.
@OftXanadu@RepPatHarrigan That would be wrong! China has the exclusive rights to reverse-engineer US tech. I'm sure the part is on Temu or Alibaba anyway.
@DrEricDing@TerryGlavin Unlike World War I, where influenza caused roughly 40% of all American military deaths, the impact of influenza during World War II was statistically negligible. There was no major influenza pandemic during WWII.