The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment

By C. Will. Living Reviews in Relativity, 2005

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The status of experimental tests of general relativity and of theoretical frameworks for analyzing them is reviewed. Einstein’s equivalence principle (EEP) is well supported by experiments such as the Eötvös experiment, tests of special relativity, and the gravitational redshift experiment. Ongoing tests of EEP and of the inverse square law are searching for new interactions arising from unification or quantum gravity. Tests of general relativity at the post-Newtonian level have reached high precision, including the light deflection, the Shapiro time delay, the perihelion advance of Mercury, and the Nordtvedt effect in lunar motion. Gravitational wave damping has been detected in an amount that agrees with general relativity to better than half a percent using the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar, and other binary pulsar systems have yielded other tests, especially of strong-field effects. When direct observation of gravitational radiation from astrophysical sources begins, new tests of general relativity will be possible.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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Citations in the corpus

Testing the Kerr Black Hole Hypothesis Using X-Ray Reflection Spectroscopy (2016, result): “Einstein’s theory of general relativity is a pillar of modern physics and in agreement with all the available observational tests (Will 2014).”
The astrophysics of nanohertz gravitational waves (2018, background): “General relativity has been an exceptionally successful physical theory and continues to stand up to over 100 years of tests of its accuracy (Will 2014).”
Tests of Lorentz invariance: a 2013 update (2013, methodology): “Current constraints are α1 < 10 −4 and α2 < 4× 10 [214] and so from a PPN analysis alone there is still a large 2-d region of parameter space that remains consistent with available tests of GR.”