“Then I would have felt sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct.”

— Albert Einstein

When asked by a student what he would have done if Sir Arthur Eddington's famous 1919 gravitational lensing experiment, which confirmed relativity, had instead disproved it.
As quoted in Reality and Scientific Truth : Discussions with Einstein, von Laue, and Planck (1980) by Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider, p. 74
Attributed in posthumous publications
Variant: "I would have felt sorry for the dear Lord! The theory is, of course, all right." Quoted in The Physicist's Conception of Nature by Jagdish Mehra (1979), p. 131 http://books.google.com/books?id=lSoRzxFye-4C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA131#v=onepage&q&f=false. This source attributes it to a conversation with Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider, author of the book the previous version is from.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Albert Einstein 702

German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativi… 1879–1955

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“Then I would have felt sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct.”

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