The Classical Tests of General Relativity II: Starlight Deflected by the Sun.

I Followed the Science and it Led Me to Epstein

Introduction

"The vaccine is 95% effective," said the Senior Vice President of Pfizer, in December 2020 as the company sought emergency-use authorization from the FDA. But on their way to making $100 billion in revenue, the rapid rollout lacked transparency regarding significant risks, and people's right to make an informed choice was removed.

"97% of climate scientists agree on human-caused global warming," claimed a researcher in 2004, in an article that, for some reason, had not been peer-reviewed before it was published in Science, just days before a major climate conference. Her assertion was misleading at best. And when the Climatic Research Unit's server was hacked a few years later, the world saw how climate scientists had been manipulating data, suppressing opposing views, and conspiring to exaggerate the evidence for human-caused global warming.

The mantra was, 'Follow the Science.' However, 'the Science' (capital 'S') is settled by consensus, cannot be questioned and shuts down dissenting views. Because ‘the Science’ isn’t science at all—it is a carefully crafted narrative designed to benefit particular industries or individuals. (I’ll leave it to you to decide if these narratives are being controlled by a global cabal of powerful, shadowy figures, or just an outworking of mass formation).

If you're still within the mainstream, this might all sound like "crazy conspiracy talk." So, let me throw in another example—this one from the last century. It goes like this: "Starlight passing near the sun is deflected twice as much as expected which proves Einstein’s General Relativity". You guessed it, another false claim. And this article breaks it down—shadowy figures included; if you can believe it.

The Three Classical Tests of Relativity

When Einstein published his theory of general relativity in 1915, he outlined three definitive tests for which his theory differed from Newtonian physics. He insisted in a letter to The Times of London that if any one of these three proved to be wrong, the whole theory would collapse. The results of these ‘classical’ tests of general relativity were summarised in 1964 by American theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman:

‘The three discrepancies first derived by Einstein have been experimentally confirmed: The orbit of Mercury is not a fixed ellipse; starlight passing near the sun is deflected twice as much as you would think; and the rates of clocks depend on their location in a gravitational field. Whenever the predictions of Einstein have been found to differ from the ideas of Newtonian mechanics, Nature has chosen Einstein’.

The orbit of Mercury (Test 1) and the rates of clocks (Test 3) will be explored in future posts. Spoiler alert: in all of these tests there are compelling reasons to argue that it wasn’t ‘Nature’ choosing Einstein’s predictions over Newton’s—it was fallible men and women, driven by conflicts of interest, making that choice.

I won’t forget the fourth classic test of general relativity—the ‘Shapiro delay’ which will also be covered in future posts, as well as the most famous tests of special relativity. But today we’ll look at the second classical test of general relativity showing that starlight passing near the Sun is deflected twice as much as you would think... does ‘Nature’ choose Einstein over Newton?

What is the Mechanism?

Figure 1: Starlight (solid white line) bends as it passes through the Sun's atmosphere (blue), causing the star's apparent position (dotted line) to differ from its actual location. Source: Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.

What causes the deflection of starlight as it passes near the Sun? One early solution for this phenomenon was to compare it with the everyday experience of refraction. The law of refraction had been formulated by French mathematician Pierre de Fermat in 1662. It states that a ray of light is deflected in a medium of higher refractive index because it slows down but still seeks the fastest path compared to other nearby paths. In 1690 Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens provided geometric proof of Fermat’s principle, showing that when a light ray travels from one medium into a more dense medium, the light waves change direction because they change speed (figure 2).

Figure 2: Wave refraction according to Huygens' principle. When a wave enters a new medium at an angle, the portion that contacts the medium first slows down (the first yellow dot on the left). Source: Wikipedia.

For example, light waves reflected off a straw sitting in a glass of water take the most energy-efficient route to your eye, not the most direct route, which is why the straw appears ‘bent’, or in a location other than it is. In this example, light slows down in the denser medium due to the way it interacts with the atoms and molecules. In air, light travels close to its maximum speed (about 299,792 km/s). However when it enters the denser medium of water, the light interacts with the atoms and molecules of the water and its speed slows to approximately 225,000 km/s.

In 1911, Einstein applied this principle of slowing light speed to calculate the deflection of starlight as it passed by the Sun. However, instead of explaining the slowing and subsequent bending of light by gradual changes in the medium around the Sun, he attributed the slowing to the gradient of the Sun’s gravitational field. He proposed that gravity, not the medium, was responsible for the bending of light. Einstein applied Huygens' principle to describe this deflection mathematically and derived a formula to calculate the amount of deflection. He submitted his work to the prestigious German physics journal Annalen der Physik in June 1911. In this paper, Einstein said:

‘... that the velocity of light in the gravitational field is a function of the place, we may easily infer, by means of Huygens’s principle, that light-rays propagated across a gravitational field undergo deflexion.’¹

Einstein had calculated a deflection of starlight by the Sun of 0.83 arc seconds. It’s interesting to note that over a century earlier, fellow German astronomer Johann von Soldner had calculated a deflection of 0.9 arc seconds for starlight passing near the Sun’s surface.

But now Einstein faced a conundrum: his special theory from 1905 had asserted that light speed must remain constant, and yet he’d found that varying the speed of light could easily describe how it is deflected by the gravitational fields of celestial objects. He resolved this dichotomy by proposing light speed is only constant in constant gravitational fields:

‘the writer of these lines is of the opinion that the theory of relativity is still in need of a generalisation, in the sense that the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is to be abandoned. According to this opinion, this principle is to be retained only for regions of practically constant gravitational potential.’ (1915, p259).

Later that year, using the equations of general relativity, Einstein recalculated the deflection of starlight by the Sun to arrive at a value of 1.745 arc seconds, twice the amount predicted using classical physics.⁶ Einstein had set the stage for a showdown: his new theory of gravity—in which light speed remained constant and its path around the Sun followed the curvature of spacetime, versus the empirical physics of Sir Isaac Newton—where light simply changed speed as it encountered a new medium.

The Solar Eclipse of 1919

To test which method was correct (if any), two expeditions were organised to measure starlight deflection during the solar eclipse of May 29, 1919. During a total eclipse, it is possible to measure the positions of stars very close to the Sun that would not be visible during daylight. By comparing their position during the eclipse to their position when measured at night (with the Sun not in the path of light), any bending of the light by the Sun can be calculated. At great expense, one team of researchers travelled to the Brazilian town of Sobral and another team went to the West African island of Príncipe.⁷ An earlier German expedition in 1914 to the Crimea in the Russian Empire had failed to obtain a result because the First World War had broken out and the astronomers had either been forced to return home or taken prisoner by the Russians.

During the war British astronomer Arthur Eddington objected to serving in the army on religious grounds. An exemption was granted to him on the condition that he led the expedition to Príncipe. In observing the eclipse, Eddington encountered substantial margins of error due to the precision of the telescope (2 to 3 arc-seconds resolution), as well as overcast conditions, atmospheric turbulence, and small sample size. Furthermore, after the pictures of the eclipse had been taken, some of the photographic plates were damaged by the heat. In compiling the results, Eddington also decided to leave out some plates due to a ‘faulty instrument’.⁷ In the end, however, Eddington’s numbers agreed with the prediction of general relativity.

The results from the 1919 expedition were cautiously accepted by the scientific community. When preliminary results were announced at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, chair Joseph Thomson said:

‘It is difficult for the audience to weigh fully the meaning of the figures that have been put before us, but the Astronomer Royal [Dyson] and Prof. Eddington have studied the material carefully, and they regard the evidence as decisively in favour of the larger value for the displacement.’

Writing about the results of the expedition, Eddington later said:

‘Although the material was very meagre compared with what had been hoped for, the writer (who it must be admitted was not altogether unbiased) believed it convincing.’

The contest had been decided. On November 7, 1919, news outlets worldwide proclaimed that Einstein’s prediction of light bending under general relativity had been confirmed, propelling him to celebrity status. The New York Times headlined, “Einstein Theory Triumphs,” while The Times of London declared, “Revolution in Science” and “Newtonian Ideas Overthrown.” The news triggered a media frenzy, further fueled by a widely distributed, cropped photograph of Einstein on Broadway, falsely suggesting a massive public celebration.

Fig 3: A wider view reveals the crowd isn't focused on Einstein; they're watching the car behind him, which carries Weizmann. Source

The cropped photo had misrepresented the event; the crowd were lining the streets to celebrate the arrival of another Jewish figure arriving in New York, travelling in a car behind Einstein.

The Empiricist Strikes Back

Since the early 2000s, former NASA scientist Dr. Edward Dowdye has been pointing out that observed starlight deflection occurs exclusively within a star's plasma limb, not in the surrounding space. The plasma limb of a star such as the Sun encompasses the chromosphere and corona, where hot, ionized gas extends beyond the star's surface. Light bending is observed only when starlight traverses this region of plasma. According to Dowdye, "a direct interaction between gravitation and electromagnetism occurs nowhere in plasma-free space". These empirical observations provide clear and compelling evidence that plasma, not gravity, is responsible for the light bending. These observations refute the hypothesis that gravity bends light. Einstein's general relativity prediction is debunked.

Furthermore, the plasma limb hypothesis is easily supported by calculations of minimum energy paths, which demonstrate that electromagnetic radiation is deflected by 1.75 arc seconds relative to the solar plasma limb, but not above it in empty space. Thus, when the light-bending equation is derived using classical physics—and corrects the mistaken assumptions that Einstein had made in 1911—it gives the same result as the equation derived from general relativity. But in this case, it has nothing to do with general relativity. The equation is based on the ionized plasma in the plasma limb, which in turn follows the Sun's gravitational gradient field. To put it another way, the gravitational field acts on the solar plasma limb and the solar plasma limb acts on the electromagnetic waves. This is expressed mathematically as follows:

Figure 4: Formula for deflection of light by the Sun. Where α is the deflection angle in radians, G is the universal gravitational constant, M is the mass of the Sun, c is the speed of light, and ξ is the nearest point of approach of a given ray of light to the centre of the gravitating mass (M) that is enclosed in an analytical Gaussian sphere.

Dowdye showed that the Sun's gravitational gradient field acts indirectly, not directly, on the electromagnetic waves deflected from an extragalactic radio pulsar. This effect was found to be completely independent of the frequency of the waves being deflected at the solar plasma limb.

So the observations are in. The math checks out. And yet, there is still an unwavering, seemingly a priori commitment to Einstein’s theory, even when faced with compelling evidence to the contrary. Why is that? Could it be that a powerful group of global elites is pushing the narrative to support these so-called ‘proofs’ of general relativity? Is it too far-fetched to think that there are hidden forces at play, shaping the story behind the scenes? After all, there have certainly been a few individuals who have exerted their influence over the years.

I Followed the Science and it Led Me to Einstein Epstein

It’s no secret that in 2012 a Physics conference was held to define gravity, financed by none other than Jeffrey Epstein. An article from April 19, 2012, by Online PR Media reported on the event:

‘Science Activist, Jeffrey Epstein, Holds a Conference of Nobel Laureates to Define Gravity’

Top physicists including three Nobel Laureates meet to define gravity.

/EINPresswire.com/ Twenty-one renowned physicists, including three Nobel Laureates, recently met on St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands to determine what the consensus is, if any, for defining gravity. The conference was financed by science philanthropist Jeffrey Epstein and his foundation, J. Epstein VI Inc. It was organized by        , Professor of Physics at Arizona State University. The Nobel Laureates included particle physicists      ,   and      . Other scientists attending were theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking,      from Princeton University, and      from MIT.’

“Jeffrey has the mind of a physicist.” Harvard mathematician and biologist Martin Novak told New York magazine in 2002. “It’s like talking to a colleague in your field.”

We may never find out how much influence Epstein had in the theoretical physics community, but we’ve known for a long time that big personalities wielded influence over the Nobel Society and peer review networks, enabling them to promote certain theories while suppressing or undermining others. You’ll have to do your own research to find out how much these 'shadowy figures' championed the theory underpinning the Big Bang narrative.

We know that ‘Big Pharma’ prioritise profit over patient well-being, ‘Big Gov’ exploit fear to seize greater control, and ‘Big Personalities’ control scientific funding and reward for the sake of personal agendas and influence. All this means that claiming to 'follow the Science' has become a far cry from actually being scientific. Truly following the science should mean that financial incentives don't bias research or conclusions. It should mean that truth is prioritised over profit. Following the science should be a tool to develop genuine solutions to real-world problems. It should be possible to both follow the science, and to be rewarded for meaningful contributions that benefit society.

References & Further Reading

1. Einstein, A. (1911) Über den Einfluß der Schwerkraft auf die Ausbreitung des Lichtes [On the Influence of Gravity on the Propagation of Light]. Annalen der Physik, Vol 35 pp.898-908 https://myweb.rz.uni-augsburg.de/~eckern/adp/history/einstein-papers/1911_35_898-908.pdf cited in Unzicker, A. Einstein’s Lost Key How We Overlooked the Best Idea of the 20th Century. 2015.

2. Einstein, A. (1912–1914) Cited In: Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings 1912–1914 (English translation supplement) pp.132-313 https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol7-trans/156?highlightText=%22spatially%20variable%22

3. Weinstein, G. (2012) Einstein's 1912–1913 struggles with Gravitation Theory: Importance of Static Gravitational Fields Theory. arXiv:1202.2791 [physics.hist-ph] January 31, 2012. https://arxiv.org/abs/1202.2791

4. Abraham, P. (1982) Subtle is the Lord. The Science and Life of Albert Einstein. Oxford University Press, p.230. Cited In: Weinstein, G. (2012) Einstein's 1912-1913 struggles with Gravitation Theory: Importance of Static Gravitational Fields Theory. arXiv:1202.2791 [physics.hist-ph] January 31, 2012.

5. Jürgen, R. (2007) The Summit Almost Scaled: Max Abraham as a Pioneer of a Relativistic Theory of Gravitation. New York, Berlin: Springer, pp.305-330. Cited In: Weinstein, G. Einstein's 1912–1913 struggles with Gravitation Theory: Importance of Static Gravitational Fields Theory. arXiv:1202.2791 [physics.hist-ph] January 31, 2012

6. Ginoux, J-M. (2022) Albert Einstein and the Doubling of the Deflection of Light. Foundations of Science Vol. 27, pp.829–850 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10699-021-09783-4

7. Eddington, A. (1920) Space, Time and Gravitation: An Outline of the General Relativity Theory. (Cambridge Science Classics), Cambridge University Press 1987/1920. Chapter VI. p. 107 Cited In: Broekaert, J. (2018) A spatially-VSL gravity model with 1-PN limit of GRT. Oct 8.

8. Veritasium (2020) Why No One Has Measured the Speed Of Light. YouTube Oct 31, 2020.

9. Einstein, A. (1905) ‘Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter K¨orper’ [On The Electrodynamics Of Moving Bodies] Annalen der Physik. 17:891, Cited in: Walker, J. http://www.fourmilab.ch/