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One of the little projects I got assigned in grad school was tocut
analyze the data that Eddington got in 1919 that he was so sure
verified Einstein's prediction of gravitational bending of light.
It was not particularly difficult to see that, since the solar corona
obscured the stars nearest to the sun, and only stars about three
solar radii out or farther could be analyzed, that the errors
inherent in the method were such that discriminating between the
maximum of .75 (?) arc-sec predicted by Newton, and 1.75 (?) arc-sec
predicted by Einstein was simply not possible. In fact, Eddington's
data were not inconsistent with no bending, although zero was near
the limits of the error bar. Fortunately for Eddington's reputation,