100 years of general relativity

Abstract

The article briefly presents the reasoning that led Einstein from special to general relativity, and then describes the most interesting and most important observations and experiments that confirm the predictions of relativity. These are: the perihelion precession of Mercury’s orbit, the gravitational deflection of electromagnetic waves (including gravitational lenses), the search for gravitational waves, the measurement of the precession of a gyroscope’s spin axis on an orbit around the Earth, and the relativistic effects in the Global Positioning System.