That's an excellent example of what's called a crucial test, which is sort of the Pinnacle of what science is all about. If we do a test and it doesn't agree with a particular theory that we have that's problematic, but that doesn't mean that it refutes the theory because if you were to refute the only theory that you have where do you jump to you don't have any alternative if we were to do a scientific test tomorrow and it was inconsistent with the theory of general relativity. Then what there is no alternative to general relativity.
T in fact when there have been experiments over the years that seemed to have been inconsistent with general relativity guess what they've all turned out to be faulty if you had to
choose between whether or not general relativity has been refuted by your test
or your test is flawed go with the fact that your test has been flawed in the case of eddington's experiment. We had two
viable theories for what gravity was. We had Newton's theory of universal gravitation on the one
hand and we had Einstein's general theory of relativity on the
other this experiment that you described.
How much the light was bent during a solar eclipse the correct way of describing what happened is not that we showed that general relativity was correct in some final sense. But rather we
refuted Newton's theory of gravitation Newton's theory was ruled
out because it was inconsistent with the test while general relativity was consistent with the test. This doesn't mean that general relativity is the final word in science. It means
it is the best theory we have for
now and there's a whole bunch of reasons that we might think general relativity ultimately.
Has to turn out false we never have the final word and that's a good thing. That's a really positive
optimistic thing because it means we can keep on improving we can keep on
making progress and we keep on discovering new things. There is no end of science the long thought about idea that so many have feared that one day progress will come to a halt that science will end. In fact, we are at the beginning of infinity and we will always be the beginning of infinity precisely because we can improve our ideas because we're fallible human beings so
None of our theories are perfect because we aren't in our process by which we create knowledge isn't perfect either. It's error-prone.
