Was Einstein Right? : Putting General Relativity to the Test
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Description
This book is an examination of the way in which Einstein's general theory of relativity - the theory of gravitation and of space-time, has held up under today's exacting scrutiny of planetary probes, radio astronomy, atomic clocks and electronic super-computers. Clifford M. Will, who has devoted two decades to this question, brings to the general reader a full account of the people, ideas and machines that have put Einstein's theory to the test, covering tests from about 1960 to check the predictions of general relativity accurately and aims to find new predictions to check. He tells the story of relativity from the first faint photographs in 1919 confirming Einstein's prediction of the bending of starlight in the sun's gravitational field, to the design of the delicate gyroscopes now being prepared for a critical space shuttle experiment in the 1990s.
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Product details
- Paperback | 288 pages
- 130 x 190mm | 209g
- 01 Dec 1988
- Oxford University Press
- Oxford Paperbacks
- Oxford, United Kingdom
- 8pp b&w photographs, diagrams, drawings, further reading list, index
- 0192822039
- 9780192822031
Table of contents
The renaissance of general relativity; the straight road to curved space-time; the gravitational red shift of light and clocks; the departure of light from the straight and narrow; the perihelion shift of Mercury - triumph or trouble; the time delay of light - better late than never; do the Earth and the moon fall the same; the rise and fall of the Brans-Dicke theory; is the gravitational constant constant; the binary pulsar - gravity waves exist; the frontiers of experimental relativity; astronomy after the renaissance - is general relativity useful.
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