Daniel Kennefick is associate professor of physics at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is the author of Traveling at the Speed of Thought: Einstein and the Quest for Gravitational Waves and a coauthor of An Einstein Encyclopedia.Here he shares some thoughts on a big screen adaptation of his new book, No Shadow of a Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse That Confirmed Einstein's Theory of Relativity:
It’s not so difficult to imagine how the film world would decide to adapt my book for the screen, because it’s already been done! The story of the 1919 eclipse which confirmed Einstein’s theory of Relativity is of such scientific importance that the television movie Einstein and Eddington was made by the BBC in 2008. It starred David Tennant (of Dr. Who fame) as Arthur Stanley Eddington, the most famous of the Astronomers involved in the expedition, and Andy Serkis as Einstein. The movie was not without its flaws. The opening scene shows Eddington completing his preparations on the island of Principe the night before the eclipse with the scene illuminated by an enormous full Moon. Of course an eclipse of the Sun can only take place at the dark of the Moon! But it was quite entertaining with convincing performances. So, why even write my book if the story I’m telling is that well known? Well, the characters I wanted to bring to the fore were almost completely left out of the film. That’s common enough when adapting for the screen, but even written accounts have neglected or slighted these other astronomers, most notably the man who actually led the planning of the expeditions and who oversaw the analysis of the data they took. That man was England’s Astronomer Royal, Sir Frank Watson Dyson.Learn more about No Shadow of a Doubt at the Princeton University Press website.
Dyson was in charge of planning for all British eclipse expeditions at this time. He brought Eddington on board in this case because of the latter’s theoretical expertise but minutes of the planning meetings and letters between them show that Dyson was very much the senior man. This was because his own research dealt extensively with the kind of precision astrometry (the measurement of the positions of stars) which was required to test Einstein’s theory. The movie refers to Eddington as the “best measuring man in England,” but in real life, and for this specific task, that man was Dyson. Weirdly, the movie almost completely removes Dyson from the story. Much of his role is absorbed into a composite character, given the name of the English physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, who had nothing to do with the eclipse in actual history. Jim Broadbent, the well-known character actor, does a fine job with this role, and I rather like to think of him playing Dyson in a more fully rounded portrayal of the 1919 expeditions.
I say expeditions because there were two expeditions, one to Principe, off the coast of west Africa, and the other to the Brazilian city of Sobral. The movie has Dyson’s character assisting Eddington on Principe. In reality he was in charge of the other expedition, but did not travel to Brazil, leaving that task to two of his assistants. But it was this expedition which actually obtained the data which overthrew Newton and made Einstein famous. Eddington's data was of limited value because clouds almost completely obscured his view of the Sun. Thus it was Dyson who directed the analysis of the important data and it is his hand writing that is found on the data analysis sheets, written months after the eclipse, making the decisive statement in favor of Einstein. The movie hilariously has the data analysis performed by Eddington in front of an audience of fellow scientists in November 1919. Of course this famous joint meeting of two English learned societies was only arranged by Dyson after the team at his observatory in Greenwich (which did not include Eddington) had finished its painstaking analysis of the data. I hope my book will highlight his central contribution to this most famous of scientific experiments in this centenary year.
--Marshal Zeringue
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