Einstein became world famous on 7 November 1919, following press publication of a meeting held in London on 6 November 1919 where the results were announced of two British expeditions led by Eddington, Dyson and Davidson to measure how much background starlight is bent as it passes the Sun. Three data sets were obtained: two showed the measured deflection matched the theoretical prediction of Einstein's 1915 Theory of General Relativity, and became the official result; the third was discarded as defective.

At the time, the experimental result was accepted by the expert astronomical community. However, in 1980 a study by philosophers of science Earman and Glymour claimed that the data selection in the 1919 analysis was flawed and that the discarded data set was fully valid and was not consistent with the Einstein prediction, and that, therefore, the overall result did not verify General Relativity. This claim, and the resulting accusation of Eddington's bias, was repeated with exaggeration in later literature and has become ubiquitous.

The 1919 and 1980 analyses of the same data provide two discordant conclusions. We reanalyse the 1919 data, and identify the error that undermines the conclusions of Earman and Glymour.

爱因斯坦于 1919 年 11 月 7 日成名，1919 年 11 月 6 日在伦敦举行的一次会议的新闻发布会上公布了由爱丁顿、戴森和戴维森领导的两次英国探险队的结果，以测量背景星光在经过太阳。获得了三个数据集：两个显示测量的挠度与爱因斯坦1915年广义相对论的理论预测相匹配，并成为官方结果；第三个因有缺陷而被丢弃。

当时，实验结果被天文界专家接受。然而，1980 年科学哲学家 Earman 和 Glymour 的一项研究声称，1919 年分析中的数据选择存在缺陷，丢弃的数据集完全有效，与爱因斯坦的预测不一致，因此，总体结果没有验证广义相对论。这种说法，以及由此产生的对爱丁顿偏见的指责，在后来的文学作品中被夸大地重复，并变得无处不在。

1919 年和 1980 年对相同数据的分析提供了两个不一致的结论。我们重新分析了 1919 年的数据，并找出了破坏 Earman 和 Glymour 结论的错误。