Experimental Tests of Relativistic Gravity

The confrontation between Einstein’s gravitation theory and experimental results, notably binary pulsar data, is summarized and its significance discussed. Experiment and theory agree at the 10−3 level or better. All the basic structures of Einstein’s theory (coupling of gravity to matter; propagation and self-interaction of the gravitational field, including in strong-field conditions) have been verified. However, the theoretical possibility that scalar couplings be naturally driven toward zero by the cosmological expansion suggests that the present agreement between Einstein’s theory and experiment might be compatible with the existence of a long-range scalar contribution to gravity (such as the dilaton field, or a moduli field, of string theory). This provides a new theoretical paradigm, and new motivations for improving the experimental tests of gravity.