Portal:History of science/Article/Week 29, 2006
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Tests of Einstein's general theory of relativity did not provide an experimental foundation for the theory until well after it was introduced in 1915. Physicists accepted the theory because it correctly accounted for the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, a phenomenon which had long baffled physicists, and because it unified Newton's law of universal gravitation with special relativity in a conceptually simple way. (Einstein has been famously quoted as saying that if his theory was falsified, then he would have felt "sorry for the dear Lord.") Despite Einstein's proposal of three classical tests, the theory was without strong experimental support until a program of precision tests was started in 1959. This program has systematically tested general relativity in weak gravitational fields and severely limited possible deviations from the theory. Since 1974, Hulse and Taylor have studied stronger gravitational fields in binary pulsars. In these regimes, on typical solar system scales, general relativity has been extremely well tested.
On the largest scales, such as galactic and cosmological scales, general relativity has not yet been subject to precision tests. Some have interpreted dark matter and dark energy as a failure of Einstein's theory at large distances, small accelerations, or small curvatures. Likewise, the very strong fields around black holes, especially supermassive black holes, which are thought to power quasars and less dramatic active galactic nuclei, are still an object of intense study. Observations of these objects are difficult, and the interpretation of these observations is heavily dependent upon astrophysics other than general relativity or competing fundamental theories of gravitation, but they are qualitatively consistent with the black hole concept as modeled in general relativity.
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