Curvatura de la Luz

Abstract

The idea that light may be bent gravitationally when passing near massive bodies is old, stemming at least back to Newton and Laplace. In a corpuscular model of light, such as the one of Newton, it is natural that the gravitational attraction will make an otherwise straight light path bend like the trajectory of any material body. The gravitational bending of light by the Sun computed in Newtonian theory for a massive photon, with the limit of the mass going to
zero, turns out to be 0.87 arcseconds - exactly one half of the value predicted by general relativity. When Eddington measured the true value during a Solar eclipse observed from the island of Principe in 1919, he obtained a result which agreed with that of Einstein’s theory within errors bars, whereas the Newtonian prediction was a factor of 2 too small. It was this success (”Newton was wrong - Einstein was right”) that brought world fame Einstein. Today the general relativistic value of the deflection angle has been proven correct to the per cent level.