Around this time the Royal Society of London and the Royal Astronomical Society announced their findings from a solar eclipse which occurred earlier in 1919 and it concurred that this patent clerk’s new concept of General Relativity appeared to be correct!
This was really a revolution in Physics too. Until then, the Scientific Community was mostly locked into the Newtonian view which to my understanding is rather constant, predictable and mechanical. You can read more about Einstein’s newfound celebrity here through Smithsonian and I’m confident there are better explanations on what he proved elsewhere. If you’re lazy and want the TLDR version from me, keep on reading because this is what I remembered from Astronomy class in high school.
For decades, everyone pretty much thought light was sort of invincible. As in it travelled in a straight line yet it could be bogged through the atmosphere (why its speed is measured in a vacuum) and refracted through a prism. I’m confident the particle versus wave debate was also occurring before 1919. What Einstein proposed and it required an eclipse to initially prove was gravity being capable of bending light. So photos were taken during the darkness caused by the Moon blocking out the Sun and…the stars behind our Sun (what constellations we’d see six earlier/later in the night sky) weren’t exactly where they should be. Thus, Einstein was on to something! Our mere Sun (compared to the Supergiants in Orion) had enough pull to bend the light emitted from stars years, decades, centuries away! It led to other implications regarding gravity. If it could bend light, it’s also bending space (all objects do) and here’s where my head begins to hurt, time. Time? Yes. Time progresses on Earth at a slower rate than for the astronauts living up in the International Space Station. It really isn’t terribly significant on the scale we humans exist on. I think the astronaut who has an identical twin came back only a second or two younger than his Earthbound counterpart and he had to be on ISS for over half a year. However, Einstein is dead on with this mattering for computers and satellites in that a millisecond, even nanosecond’s worth of accuracy is critical. Case in point, GPS satellites have to compensate for the Earth “getting ahead of them.”
Despite a century of evidence proving Einstein 99.9% correct, Phyllis Schaffley has a dipshit son who operates a right-wing Wikipedia site claiming General Relativity is a Liberal fiction and/or conspiracy. He better not depend on Google Maps or the GPS on his smart phone.