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On Experimental Tests of the General Theory of Relativity

Schiff, L. I.·1960·American Journal of Physics

Abstract

This paper explores the extent to which the three “crucial tests” support the full structure of the general theory of relativity, and do not merely verify the equivalence principle and the special theory of relativity, which are well established by other experimental evidence. It is shown how the first-order changes in the periods of identically constructed clocks and the lengths of identically constructed measuring rods can be found without using general relativity, and how the red shift and the deflection of light can be computed from them. Only the planetary orbit precession provides a real test of general relativity. Terrestrial or satellite experiments that would go beyond supplying corroborative evidence for the equivalence principle and special relativity would be extremely difficult to perform, and would, for example, require a frequency standard with an accuracy somewhat better than one part in 1018.

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Metadata

Authors
Schiff, L. I.
Venue
American Journal of Physics
Published
1960-04-01
Volume
28
Issue
4
Pages
340-343
ISSN
  • 0002-9505 (ISSN-L)
  • 1943-2909
OpenAlex
W2037418735
Cited by
255
References
0
FWCI
3.02
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: On Experimental Tests of the General Theory of Relativity. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1119/1.1935800
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Schiff, L. I. (1960). On Experimental Tests of the General Theory of Relativity. American Journal of Physics. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.1935800

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.