Some time ago I wrote about Mendel’s law of genetic inheritance, and how statistical analysis of Mendel’s data suggested his results were too good to be true. It’s not that his theory is wrong; it’s just that the data he provided as evidence for his theory seem to have been manipulated in such a way as to seem incontrovertible. Unfortunately the data lack the variation that Mendel’s own law would also imply should occur in measurements of that type, leading to the charge that the data had been manufactured or manipulated in some way.
Well, there’s a similar controversy about the picture at the top of this page.
The photograph, taken 100 years ago, was as striking at that time as the recent picture of a black hole, discussed in an earlier post, is today. However, this picture was taken with basic photographic equipment and telescopic lens and shows a total solar eclipse, as the moon passes directly between the Earth and the Sun.
A full story of the controversy is given here.
In summary: Einstein’s theory of general relativity describes gravity not as a force between two attracting masses – as is central to Newtonian physics – but as a curvature caused in space-time due to the presence of massive objects. All objects cause such curvature, but only those that are especially massive, such as stars and planets, will have much of an effect.
Einstein’s relativity model was completely revolutionary compared to the prevailing view of physical laws at the time. But although it explained various astronomical observations that were anomalous according to Newtonian laws, it had never been used to predict anomalous behaviour. The picture above, and similar ones taken at around the same time, changed all that.
In essence, blocking out the sun’s rays enabled dimmer and more distant stars to be accurately photographed. Moreover, if Einstein’s theory were correct, the photographic position of these stars should be slightly distorted because of the spacetime curvature effects of the sun. But the effect is very slight, and even Newtonian physics suggests some disturbance due to gravitational effects.
In an attempt to get photographic evidence at the necessary resolution, the British astronomer Arthur Eddington set up two teams of scientists – one on the African island of Príncipe, the other in Sobral, Brazil – to take photographs of the solar eclipse on 29 May, 1919. Astronomical and photographic equipment was much more primitive in those days, so this was no mean feat.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, a combination of poor weather conditions and other setbacks meant that the results were less reliable than were hoped for. It seems that the data collected at Príncipe, where Eddington himself was stationed, were inconclusive, falling somewhere between the Newton and Einstein model predictions. The data at Sobral were taken with two different types of telescope, with one set favouring the Newton view and the other Einstein’s. Eddington essentially combined the Einstein-favouring data from Sobral together with those from Príncipe and concluded that the evidence supported Einsteins relativistic model of the universe.
Now, in hindsight, with vast amounts of empirical evidence of many types, we know Einstein’s model to be fundamentally correct. But did Eddington selectively choose his data to support Einstein’s model?
There are different points of view, which hinge on Eddington’s motivation for dropping a subset of the Sobral data from his analysis. One point of view is that he wanted Einstein’s view to be correct, and therefore simply ignored the data that were less favourable. This argument is fuelled by political reasoning: it sarges that since Eddington was a Quaker, and therefore a pacifist, he wanted to support a German theory as a kind of post-war reconciliation.
The alternative point of view, for which there is some documentary evidence, is that the Sobral data which Eddington ignored had been independently designated as unreliable. Therefore, on proper scientific grounds, Eddington had behaved entirely correctly by excluding it from his analysis, and his subsequent conclusions favouring the Einstein model were entirely consistent with the scientific data and information he had available.
This issue will probably never be fully resolved, though in a recent review of several books on the matter, theoretical physicist Peter Coles (no relation) claims to have reanalysed the data given in the Eddington paper using modern statistical methods, and found no reason to doubt his integrity. I have no reason to doubt that point of view, but there’s no detail of the statistical analysis that was carried out.
What’s interesting though, from a statistical point of view, is how the interpretation of the results depends on the reason for the exclusion of a subset of the Sobral data. If your view is that Eddington knew their contents and excluded them on that basis, then his conclusions in favour of Einstein must be regarded as biased. If you accept that Eddington excluded these data a priori because of their unreliability, then his conclusions were fair and accurate.
Data are often treated as a neutral aspect of an analysis. But as this story illustrates, the choice of which data to include or exclude, and the reasons for doing so, may be factors which fundamentally alter the direction an analysis will take, and the conclusions it will reach.
