General relativity and experiment

The confrontation between General Relativity and experimental results, notably binary pulsar data, is summarized and its significance discussed. The agreement between experiment and theory is numerically very impressive. However, some recent theoretical findings (cosmological attraction toward zero scalar couplings) suggest that the present agreement between Einstein's theory and experiment might be naturally compatible with the existence of a scalar contribution to gravity. This provides a new theoretical paradigm, and new motivations for improving the experimental tests of gravity.