What then, Professor Turner went on, remains to be done? Is not the conclusion proved to the hilt? Possibly. But we can never lose by trying a different method. The Americans were not satisfied to try only one method and English astronomers wish to try something new which they had hoped to try in 1923, though their careful preparations were rendered futile by bad weather. For the first time in the history of total eclipses they propose to turn their cameras deliberately away from the sun and his surroundings, not, of course, for the whole time, but at intervals during the available five minutes. They want to compare with the field of stars surrounding the sun and distorted therefore by the Einstein fact, other fields of stars free from such distortion, so that the distortion may be made manifest in its entirety and free from any accidental climatic effects of the moment.
The discussion of the results obtained, Professor Turner added, will require several months.
When Professor Einstein was in California last year doing research work at the Mount Wilson Observatory, the late Professor Albert Michelson, the American Jewish Physicist and Nobel Prize Winner, whose experiments are regarded as the starting point of the Einstein relativity theory, was also engaged in experiments there with a vacuum tube a mile long, to measure more exactly than ever before the velocity of light. He hoped, it was stated, to reduce the possibility of error in measuring the accepted velocity of light to several decimals. The figure now accepted, it was added, is 186,330 miles per second.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
