The Scientist Who Cried "Confirmed"

From Martin Gardner's The Relativity Explosion (1976):

"Has the general thoery of relativity been supported by experimental evidence? When the first edition of this book was published [1962], physicists were complaining about the weakness of such evidence in contrast to the strong, abundant evidence for the special theory. As Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler put it in their big book Gravitation: "For the first half-century of its life, general relativity was a theorist's paradise, but an experimentalist's hell. No theory was more beautiful, and none was more difficult to test."

"This is no longer true ...."

"Einstein's theory predicts an average deflection of 1.75 seconds of arc for each star. Two measurements in 1919 showed deflections of 1.98 and 1.61, both fairly close. But the deflection dropped to 1.18 in a 1922 test and rose to 2.24 in a 1929 test. At a 1962 meeting of the Royal Society of London, a group of scientists concluded that the difficulties are so great that eclipse observers should no longer attempt such measurements."

"Dozens of sophisticated tests of general relativity in the 1970's have supported Einstein's theory and tended to discredit all its rivals...."