No-one is athiest, but as God is my judge I do get tired of the athier-than-thou attitude around here sometimes. 
ath-hole 
How, exactly, do you want us to look for graviational lensing then if not by using optics??
We see examples of lensing in radio, optical (this one’s rather good – shows you the lensed image in both optical and radio wavebands), and infra-red. All with multiple telescopes. Are you seriously suggesting that all the optics in all the world’s telescopes, in every single waveband, are somehow messed up??
Oh… That’s why they turned me down…
Ooops.
Yes, GR lensing effects apply to the entire electro-magnetic spectrum, not just visible light. For example, lensing has been observed for radio waves (see section 2.3).
We appear to be using the same reference material… 
Ah yes! Sorry, but I hadn’t seen your response yet when I posted.
No worries! I was just amused that we’d go to the same reference source!
Sounds like a garbled version of the story that the imperial bureaucracy refused to allow him to state “without religious denomination” on the paperwork associated with him taking up the professorship in Prague in 1910, on the grounds that this would invalidate the necessary oath of allegience to Emperor Franz Joseph. He was thus listed as “Mosaic” instead.
While there was undoubtedly prejudice in the hiring practices of Princeton University in 1933, he was never employed by them. The Institute for Advanced Study, which did hire him, is an independent institution and its first director, Abraham Flexner, had explicitly insisted on a completely nondisciminatory hiring policy - apart from merit. (The founder, Louis Bamberger, had envisaged a school preferring Jewish applicants, but Flexner talked him out of it.) They were also falling over themselved to woo Einstein. I doubt he had to fill in an application form to be hired by the IAS and, if there was one involved, I doubt it would have asked the question.
It’s possible to envisage some form of gravitation lensing in Newtonian terms, provided you’re prepared to envisage light as somehow being subject to universal gravitation, e.g. if it’s a stream of particles with a very small mass. And people had done the calculation: the earliest appears to have been Johann Georg von Soldner in 1801, who had been worried that it might be a source of observational error, before finding that the effect is very, very small. So nobody had really looked. It is indeed only once Einstein proposes the test that trying to see the effect is seriously considered.
I’ve a vague memory that Faraday experimentally looked for a link between optical phenomena and gravity, but not this particular effect.
One of my office-mates just pointed out that gravitational lensing occurs for gravitational waves, too, so you could in principle observe lensing without optics. Really, though, that misses the point: Once you start getting into “gravitational lensing doesn’t actually exist; it just looks like that because every single telescope ever built all has exactly the same flaws that only manifest when looking at exactly the same spot in the sky”, then you might as well just go all the way and assume that other people don’t actually exist, but are just figments of your imagination.
Relativity makes a number of different predictions that have been verified.
It explains why the Michelson-Morley experience was unable to detect the luminiferous aether.
As you mentioned, it predicted a particular amount of bending of light by gravitation.
It explained certain variations in the orbit of Mercury.
It predicts temporal effects in moving objects and objects in gravity wells. These have been observed by measuring the time for particles to decay in particle accelerators and the deviation of accurate clocks in the GPS satellites.
I’m sure there are plenty of others. It’s not something that can just be explained away with “Maybe the optics are broken.”
Indeed. The two theories, however, disagree on the amount of lensing: Einstein’s theory predicts twice as much as Newton’s. And every observation has been consistent with Einstein’s prediction, but most have not actually been consistent with Newton’s (the famous observations made during the 1918 eclipse had large enough error bars that they were consistent with either theory, and so should not have been construed as proof of anything).
Thanks, I was just about to post this. People, especially those who’ve never lived in Princeton, get IAS and Princeton confused all the time. There is very little overlap - von Neumann was at both, but I’m not aware of any other people who have had jobs in both places simultaneously off the top of my head.
I think the point of the quote was that if you start with a single premise- the measured speed of light is invariant under all conditions- then Special Relativity has to follow; it’s the only theory that doesn’t invoke ad hoc explanations for the invariance. And if Special Relativity is true, then to extend it to the more general case of accellerating movement rather than just constant movement, General Relativity has to be true. It’s as close to “can’t not be true” given the starting premise as you’re going to find. So if the prediction had been flat out wrong, then there would have been little to do except postulate that the universe behaves in an inconsistant manner.
When I replied I didn’t notice the misspelling, and my point was that excluding people based on views about god would most likely limit their ability to support their motto as stated, because the smartest people (and everyone else) don’t all have similar religious views.
Otherwise unsuccessfully trying to think of overlapping examples, I’ve stumbled across the detail that, of all people, Einstein is someone who technically had jobs at both. According to Eugene Wigner (University, not IAS) in his memoirs, he arranged for Einstein to be formally appointed a faculty member of the university physics department while he was at the IAS. My impression from the passage is that he got an office and the various privilages, but not a salary and certainly no teaching duties. An honorary gesture and probably not one he asked for. Or had to do any paperwork to apply for.
One other reason people possible get the two institutions confused in this instance is that in the early days of the IAS, the university put up some of its staff - including Einstein - in Fine Hall.
But, dammit, you’re right. Other counterexamples to your rule aren’t obvious.
Best real-world example : Global Positioning Systems.
GPS satellites need to take into account relativistic effects due to the speed in orbit (they work using extremely accurate clocks). If Einstein had been wrong about Special Relativity, then these adjustments would have thrown everything off and GPS would not be accurate.
Special Relativity is rock solid. There have been some serious scientific challenges to General Relativity (often proposed by Robert Dicke, the most unlucky scientist of the 20th century*), but it’s always held true.
*In addition to devising some excellent – though failed – test to General Relativity, he also missed out on winning a Nobel Prize when two other scientists, using equipment Dicke had developed, discovered the radio signature of the Big Bang (To add insult, Dicke was one of the first they told).
Also against those who do not know the difference between mitigate and militate.
Actually, the GPS systems are more a test of General Relativity, not Special (and in fact, are the most sensitive tests we have for some aspects of the theory). For anything in orbit, both sorts of effects are relevant, but the general more so.
Which doesn’t change the fact that Special Relativity is the best-tested theory in human history. Measurements of subatomic processes have verified the predictions of SR to something like 20 decimal places. We can literally be more confident in SR than we are that the Sun will rise tomorrow.