Eddington could explain the blurriness of the astrographic photos, but he gave no reason to think that they would systematically err so as to give Newtonian rather than Einsteinian values for light’s degree of gravitational bending. Further, the crisp photos from the 4-inch telescope gave a value for gravitational bending that was considerably greater than that predicted by Einstein, to a degree that they could be considered to support Einstein’s theory only if that telescope, too, was assumed to be systematically biased. Eddington appeared to be engaged in some rather special pleading, then:
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