Lest We Forget: Impact of the Great War on Physics & Astronomy
Journal: Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Year: 2015

For astronomers, World War I began with the capture and imprisonment of a German eclipse expedition that had gone to the Crimea in August 1914 to look for bending of starlight by the sun, at the request of Einstein himself, who had, in 1911, predicted a value of about 0.8 arcsec (at the limb), one half of what definitive GR would say in 1915-16. Over the next few years Schwarzschild wrote his spherically symmetric solution to Einstein's equation, then died of service-related pemphigus. Physicist