The point of science isn’t just to gather evidence. It’s to gather evidence without bias. Whatever Einstein was doing looked like really good evidence to him, but he couldn’t have been sure it was good evidence. It might have just looked like good evidence. Science works by just ignoring all the evidence that might be biased. You’re ignoring a lot of evidence there, but so long as you can gather evidence relatively cheaply, that’s not much of a problem.
Suppose Einstein had a 50% chance of being significantly biased. He only gathered 20 bits of evidence instead of 30. If he is biased, GR is very likely wrong. If he isn’t, he’s very likely right. There’s a probability of almost exactly 50% that GR is true. It’s definitely worth looking into, but it certainly isn’t overwhelming.
The testing isn’t so much to prove that GR is true, as to prove that Einstein was judging the probabilities accurately when he theorized GR.
The point of science isn’t just to gather evidence. It’s to gather evidence without bias. Whatever Einstein was doing looked like really good evidence to him, but he couldn’t have been sure it was good evidence. It might have just looked like good evidence. Science works by just ignoring all the evidence that might be biased. You’re ignoring a lot of evidence there, but so long as you can gather evidence relatively cheaply, that’s not much of a problem.
Suppose Einstein had a 50% chance of being significantly biased. He only gathered 20 bits of evidence instead of 30. If he is biased, GR is very likely wrong. If he isn’t, he’s very likely right. There’s a probability of almost exactly 50% that GR is true. It’s definitely worth looking into, but it certainly isn’t overwhelming.
The testing isn’t so much to prove that GR is true, as to prove that Einstein was judging the probabilities accurately when he theorized GR.