colin wrote:the equations necessary to use general relativity to make predictions are said to be among the hardest in physics, it takes years of study to be able to make sense of a few blackboards worth of scribbles.
Eddington was one of the foremost proponents of Einstein's General Relativity theory - and his experimental work in 1919 was one of the earliest confirmations of a General Relativity prediction . A story is told (hopefully not apocryphal) of him being interviewed, where the interviewer suggested that there were only three people in the world who understood General Relativity - and the response was "I'm trying to think who the third person could be".
Maybe that's why I didn't follow up my course on Special Relativity ( a lot simpler) with a course on General Relativity.