| Gaia: | Canonically, ‘classic’ tests of general relativity (GR) include perihelion precession, the bending of light around stars, and gravitational redshift; ‘modern’
tests have to do with, inter alia, relativistic time delay, equivalence principle
tests, gravitational lensing, strong field gravity, and gravitational waves. The
orthodoxy is that both classic and modern tests of GR afford experimental
confirmation of that theory in particular. In this article, we question this
orthodoxy, by showing there are classes of both relativistic theories (with
spatiotemporal geometrical properties different from those of GR) and nonrelativistic theories (in which the lightcones of a relativistic spacetime are
‘widened’) which would also pass such tests. Thus, (a) issues of underdetermination in the context of GR loom much larger than one might have thought,
and (b) given this, one has to think more carefully about what exactly such
tests in fact are testing.
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