Abstract
ON a recent occasion I read a paper before the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society on the nature of dimensions, in which, admitting the possibility and even probability of space and time having secondary characteristics, like those suggested by Lorentz and Einstein, reasons were given for doubting whether the methods employed for finding them could be relied on, and experimental evidence, before it could be accepted, would have to be subjected to searching adverse criticism. Prof. Eddington's solar eclipse results were therefore submitted to a process essentially the reverse of his, which had for object not the confirmation of a theory, but the discovery of an empirical relation. During this process it soon became evident that the astigmatism of the cœlostat mirrors, which had given much trouble during the eclipse by distorting the star images, had also affected the field and altered the star positions. The stopping down of the objectives aggravated this evil in a double sense: first, the reduction of the star-image astigmatism makes it impossible to construct a picture of what might be called the field astigmatism of the mirrors; and, secondly, the smaller the diameter of the pencil of light rays for each star, the further apart would be the regions on the mirror from which these pencils were reflected. Therefore, if the various regions of the mirror had semi-independent tilts, the places of the stars on the plates would be affected by these tilts. If for some of the existing plates these pencils should be found to overlap, and if the star image astigmatism is sufficiently marked, then these plates might still be used for the object for which they were taken.
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STROMEYER, C. Solar Eclipse Results and the Principle of Relativity. Nature 107, 682 (1921). https://doi.org/10.1038/107682a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/107682a0
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