Einstein’s First Triumph? Or Science’s Biggest Oversight?

The historical justification for General Relativity’s first major success—the resolution of Mercury’s perihelion precession anomaly—rests on an assumption that has never been rigorously reexamined: the mass of Mercury used in Urbain Le Verrier’s perturbative calculations. While it is widely accepted that General Relativity (GR) accounts for the additional 43 arcseconds per century of Mercury’s precession, this paper presents evidence that the discrepancy may have been artificially introduced due to an overestimated mass of Mercury in Le Verrier’s original calculations.

Using a proportional mass-precession relationship, it is shown that a revised Mercury mass of 3.30×10233.30 \times 10^{23}3.30×1023 kg—consistent with modern spacecraft measurements—resolves the precession discrepancy within Newtonian mechanics without requiring relativistic corrections. This raises the critical question: Was Einstein’s correction addressing a real anomaly, or was it a response to a miscalculation?

By tracing Le Verrier’s methodology, this paper reconstructs the implicit mass he must have used and examines whether the discrepancy persists when modern values are applied to his equations. The findings suggest that a historical oversight may have led to the premature adoption of General Relativity as the necessary solution to Mercury’s orbital motion.

We conclude by discussing the broader implications: if the perihelion discrepancy was never real, then General Relativity’s original empirical justification requires reevaluation, and the physics community must confront whether its most celebrated predictive success was, in fact, a historical artifact rather than a fundamental physical discovery.