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We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.

—Max Jammer, Einstein and Religion.

In 1768, Captain Cook and his crew headed off on their legendary voyage to Tahiti. In that same year a stream of photons from the Hyades star cluster embarked on a much longer journey, along the most literal of beelines to the earth. One and a half centuries later, in the middle of the morning of May 29, 1919, the photons crossed the boundaries of our solar system on their approach toward earth. Scheduled to hit the earth at mid-day, the photons would normally be invisible, overwhelmed by the brilliance of the sun. But May 29, 1919 was no ordinary day.

Shortly after lunch, the moon began to migrate across the face of the sun. The eerie mid-day darkness of an eclipse, with its not-quite-normal color scheme and Stephen King complexion began to move across the face of the earth. Mid-day night fell and the stars began poking through the opaque blue of the sky. The stream of photons that left the Hyades cluster in 1768 grazed the edge of the sun, passing close enough to the solar system's largest body to experience a more powerful gravitational tug than any of the other bodies in the solar system, including nearby Mercury.

The intense gravitational power of the sun altered the path of the stream of photons by just under two degrees; they careened off nothing, like the mysterious deflection of a Curt Schilling curve ball. The new path of the photons as they continued their trajectory toward the earth was changed ever so slightly.

One observer of this stellar event was British astronomer and Quaker Sir Arthur Eddington, who had traveled to the island of Principe, off the coast of West Africa, where the eclipse was full. Eddington and his team had been dispatched by England's Royal Society to measure the deflection of the stream of photons from the Hyades. The measurement was perhaps the most important single piece of scientific data ever acquired in a scientific investigation. If the deflection was as anticipated, a radical new theory of gravity, destined to topple Isaac Newton's venerable explanation, would be confirmed.

May 29 dawned cloudy, and Principe was visited by torrential downpours. Eddington's team stared fitfully at the heavens, wondering if something so banal as bad weather would interfere with the measurements historian Paul Johnson would later declare inaugurated the modern world. Even as the eclipse began the clouds continued to threaten but, at the last moment, as if God himself were authoring the revelation, the clouds broke, an eclipsed sun appeared and Eddington feverishly began to slide glass photographic plates in and out of his camera, recording the position of the Hyades.

When the eclipse and its Kodak Moment had passed, Eddington began to develop his photos and make measurements on them. The stars in the Hyades cluster appeared in a different location, their apparent home in the heavens displaced ever so slightly, precisely as predicted by the new theory. Eddington looked up from his plates at a vastly different world, one of only two people on the planet who, at that moment, fully appreciated what had just happened. Isaac Newton's theory of universal gravity, like the sun in Eddington's photos, had just been eclipsed.

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