Weighing light and pondering historiographies

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Notes

1 See Stanley p. 258. No such orders of magnitude of the effect are given by Kennefick despite his repeated discussion of micrometer screws to measure the photographic glassplates and facsimiles of data sheets (358f.).

2 Kennefick (pp. 357–65) has an appendix on the data analysis sheets for the Sobral photographs, but his discussion of the data reduction is insufficient, without a single mathematical formula (did the publisher perhaps ask him to abstain from them?) and with no references to further literature on this.

3 Alistair Sponsel’s 2002 paper on the campaign to promote a favorable reception for the 1919 eclipse observations, British Journal for the History of Science, 35 (2002), 439–67, for instance, is only mentioned once by Kennefick on pp. 265–67, and my 1994-paper on Freundlich which gives a very detailed analysis of methods of data reduction and Freundlich’s critique of Eddington’s methods is missing altogether from Kennefick’s list of references, and only listed with its online repository url by Gates & Pelletier.

4 For instance, Stanley’s very first endnote (p. 339) only lists Alice Calaprice Ultimate Quotable Einstein as his source for an amusing quote about Einstein’s ‘crooked legs and warts’ and thus misses the point that this is an amusing self-description of Einstein written to a young child, rather than the odd impression of ‘someone watching’ (p. 1); Gates & Pelletier also only refer to very few secondary sources in their endnotes, but they include a lot of new source material, obtained for instance from relatives of Charles Perrine in Argentine.

5 These are mentioned by Kennefick and Stanley, but too briefly, with no good overall comparison of their efforts at alternative explanations for the measured light deflections.

6 See Ludwik Silberstein, ‘The Eclipse Results and The Contraction of Photographic Images’, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 80 (1920), 630–31; cf. Kennefick p. 240 where Davidson’s 1923 reply is discussed, and Gates & Pelletier, pp. 321f., which best captured Silberstein’s long-lasting resistance to relativity theory.

7 See K. Hentschel, ‘Erwin F. Freundlich and testing Einstein’s theory of relativity’, Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 47 (1994), 143–20 and Klaus Hentschel, The Einstein Tower. An Intertexture of Dynamic Construction, Relativity Theory and Astronomy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). Stanley misspelled the middle name of Freundlich as Findley (on p. 50) and incorrectly hyphenated his last name several times.