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Starlight passing the Sun is bent about twice as much as Newton’s law allows.

Einstein’s equation fits my measurements of light knocking electrons out of metals, for every color I tried. But quanta can’t explain how light interferes and bends into shadows, which waves explain so well. The equation still lacks a sound theory.

General relativity explains it. It makes Mercury’s perihelion move 43 arcseconds per century more than Newton’s law does, with no hidden matter needed.

My calculation of 1911 only counted how gravity slows time. It left out how gravity bends space, which bends light just as much again. So starlight passing the edge of the Sun is bent by about 1.7 arcseconds, not 0.83.

Clouds covered the Sun during the eclipse, so we couldn’t measure how much the starlight was bent.

Photographs from the eclipses of 1901, 1905, and 1908 show no planet inside Mercury’s orbit big enough to explain its motion. Whatever moves Mercury’s perihelion, it isn’t a planet, or anything else bright enough to photograph.

Lenard found that brighter light knocks more electrons out of a metal, but not faster ones. A spreading wave would shake the electrons harder the brighter it is, and send them out faster.

In Hamburg’s epidemic, the town of Altona next door was largely spared, on the same soil and under the same sky. Only its water differs: Altona filters it. The germ in the water decides it, not the soil.

Not everyone who swallows a germ falls ill, as with any infection. One man’s mild illness doesn’t show that the germ needs anything more.

The cause of cholera is a comma-shaped bacterium, which I found in 1883 and 1884 in the intestines of its victims.

Anthrax comes from one particular germ. Grown outside any animal for eight generations, it still gives mice anthrax. Its spores survive in the soil for years, which is why some pastures stay deadly, whatever their air.

Decay doesn’t come about by itself. As Pasteur showed, it’s the work of germs, living things that get in from outside and multiply. What spreads infection is the germs, not decaying matter as such.

In my wards, 16 of 35 patients died after amputations before I began killing germs with carbolic acid, and 6 of 40 since. The air is the same as before; only the germs are gone.

Broth boiled in a flask with a long, bent neck stays free of life, though air reaches it, because the germs carried by the air’s dust settle in the bend. Tip the flask so that the broth touches the bend, and it soon teems with microbes. They come from germs, not from the broth.

Mercury’s perihelion moves about 38 arcseconds per century more than Newton’s law predicts from the pull of the known planets.

Where two water companies supply the same streets, houses drinking Thames water taken below London’s sewers lose more than eight times as many people to cholera as houses drinking water taken above them. Same streets, same air, different water.

The Broad Street outbreak’s deaths cluster around one pump, and those spared drank other water: the workhouse its own well, the brewery’s men their beer. Bad air would have spared no one in the same streets.

Cholera is caused by a poison that multiplies inside its victims, leaves them in their waste, and spreads when others swallow it, mostly in water fouled by sewage. “For the morbid matter of cholera having the property of reproducing its own kind, must necessarily have some sort of structure, most likely that of a cell.”

A long pendulum’s swing turns slowly clockwise, about 11 degrees an hour in Paris, though nothing pushes it sideways. The floor beneath it turns, with the spinning Earth. A motionless Earth can’t explain this.

Light travels more slowly through water than through air: measured with a spinning mirror, the light that went through water comes back later. Newton’s particles, pulled into the water, would travel faster there.

In October, the doctors examined a woman with a foul-smelling cancer of the womb, washed only with soap, and went on to twelve women in labor. Eleven of them died, though no corpse was involved.

Childbed fever kills mothers four times as often in the doctors’ clinic as in the midwives’ clinic next door, though both breathe the same air. Since the doctors began washing their hands in chlorine after dissecting corpses, deaths have fallen from 18 in a hundred births to 2. The cause comes on the doctors’ hands, not from the air both clinics share.

The parallax is there, only tiny. Over the year, 61 Cygni moves back and forth by 0.31 seconds of arc either way against two fainter stars beside it, just as it should if the Earth circles the Sun. The stars are simply that far away: 61 Cygni is about 660,000 times farther from us than the Sun.

Mathematical tables can be worked out and printed by machinery. Almost any table can be built up by adding differences, and gears can add, so a machine of number wheels can do it, without the mistakes that human computers and typesetters make.

I put a small round disk in a narrow beam of light, and the bright spot is there, at the center of its shadow, just as Fresnel’s theory says.