> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://absurdia.xyz/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Einstein's eclipse. - URL: https://absurdia.xyz/einsteins-eclipse/ - Published: 2026-08-14T01:41:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-07T18:15:29.000Z - Description: Absurdity is relative. - Author: Mack Simpson - Tags: Science I'm working on a quirky story about dildos (who had that on their bingo card?), but then the sky went dark yesterday over portions of Europe as they were fortunate to experience a total eclipse of the sun. So I thought I'd set what I was working on aside and quickly turn my attention to something more *relative*. Arthur Stanley [Eddington](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur%5FEddington?ref=absurdia.xyz) was a Cambridge astronomer, Quaker, mathematician, and the sort of person who voluntarily agreed to projects that, in retrospect, should probably have triggered a group of friends to hold an intervention, instead. His assignment was simple... in the same way that "just climb Everest" is simple. Previously, I've [written](https://absurdia.xyz/howdy-neighbor/) about Camus' musings on *cosmic* absurdities, and Feinberg's *local* absurdities. Eddington's task turned out to have both. You see, a former patent clerk in Switzerland named Einstein had produced a theory claiming gravity doesn't *really* work the way everyone had assumed it did for the two and a half centuries before. He said gravity isn't a force *pulling* objects through space. Instead, he wrote, *mass bends spacetime itself*, and everything, including light, makes dips, turns, and curves to follow a cosmic, topological map. And Einstein had the audacity to make a testable prediction: starlight passing near the sun, he wrote, should bend by 1.75 arcseconds. As a frame of reference, 1.75 arcseconds is about the same width as a coin... *observed from a mile away*. So now proving it (or disproving it) became Eddington's problem. Starlight only bends measurably near something *genuinely massive*, like the sun, and you can never see stars anywhere near the sun, because the sun is, let me check my notes, *extremely bright*. To verify Einstein's claim, he was going to need to photograph stars that are normally invisible because they're sitting too close to the single brightest object in our solar system. Fortunately, nature provided the solution: a total solar eclipse. Eddington's plan was to load several crates containing *extremely delicate* scientific equipment onto ships, sail them across an ocean, drag everything through a tropical, swampy, rust-inducing environment, reassemble the gear, and then wait, hoping the moon would cooperate. He was just seeing if he could overturn [Newtonian physics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical%5Fmechanics?ref=absurdia.xyz), that's all. No pressure. The thing about Sir Isaac was, the Laws the polymath had developed hadn't been just merely successful, they had been *catastrophically* successful. Newton's equations described falling apples, orbiting planets, cannonballs, comets, tides, and just about everything else anyone cared to throw at it. For generations, Newtonian mechanics didn't merely explain reality, it *became* reality. Eventually, "this is how gravity works," and "this is how the universe works" became interchangeable statements. *It just was.* And it *was* because it *worked.* But Newton had built [a jail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory%5Fof%5Fthe%5Fcave?ref=absurdia.xyz), a magnificent, beautiful, invisible cell whose bars went unseen and unfelt because they lined up perfectly with the world everyone observed every day. When your prison fits with perfect precision, you stop calling it a prison. You call it *home*. But then Einstein showed up and stupidly questioned *everything*. He suggested that everyone had been looking at physics the *wrong way*. Space wasn't the stage, it was the *performance*. Mass distorted it. Time distorted it. And Newton's physics itself had been recruited into hiding the conspiracy underpinning it all. This was, to put it mildly, *not* an idea that arrived with widespread applause, the obvious problem being you couldn't actually *see* curved space. Which brings us to May 29, 1919\. Two expeditions, two continents, two opportunities, and approximately seventeen thousand ways for everything to slide sideways down the shitter. The primary expedition traveled to [Sobral](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sobral,+Cear%C3%A1,+Brazil/@-3.677512,-50.8575128,5z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x7954b6af4595227:0xe0ece6e4f3ec3d5b!8m2!3d-3.6824853!4d-40.3535846!16s%2Fg%2F11bc59%5F2k2?entry=ttu&g%5Fep=EgoyMDI2MDgxMS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D&ref=absurdia.xyz), Brazil. It got the expensive, serious equipment. The telescopic equivalent of a Formula One car. Eddington's expedition headed to [Príncipe](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pr%C3%ADncipe/@1.6104029,7.312804,12z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x1070ed7a564d2215:0xf57389a898c23205!8m2!3d1.6139012!4d7.4057024!16zL20vMDJkY2xu?entry=ttu&g%5Fep=EgoyMDI2MDgxMS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D&ref=absurdia.xyz), an island off the west coast of Africa. He got the backup gear. Not what you'd choose if your intention was to rewrite physics. Testing the theory *technically* depended on *both* teams but, realistically, everyone expected Sobral's to do the heavy lifting. Then the day arrived, and the universe, apparently deciding that the situation wasn't stressful enough, introduced weather. Clouds rolled over Príncipe. Not cute, puffy, cinematic clouds, but slow, Camus-cosmic *indifferent* clouds. The kind that drift across the sky with the smug confidence of an entity that knows Eddington had crossed an ocean, hacked a path through jungles and swamps to be there, and just *didn't care* if it upset his carefully-laid plans. Eddington spent the frantic few minutes of the eclipse *desperately* trying to capture photographs of it through brief openings in the cloud cover and ended up with only *two* usable photographic glass plates. Meanwhile, over in Brazil, things were going much better. Ha. No they weren't. The weather was beautiful, the sky was clear, the eclipse was visible. Perfect. Except for one tiny issue: it turns out the sun is *hot*. (Who knew?) Now, this may sound like an obvious observation, but it became considerably more so after that heat began warping the expensive telescope everyone was counting on, and the prestigious, carefully selected, top-tier instrument started producing *blurred images.* At this point, it begins to feel less like a science experiment and more like the universe writing an episode of *Seinfeld*. And all of this was in service of measuring a displacement of just 1.75 arcseconds, an offensively small number. Measurements so tiny a microscopic scratch or smudge could ruin the entire exercise. And here's a delicious detail: the astronomers needed reference photos showing where the stars would *normally* appear to compare to the eclipse photos. How did they determine those normal positions? By using *Newtonian mechanics*. Newton's equations were used to predict where the stars *should* be, and then those predictions became the ruler used to measure Einstein's out-of-the-box thinking. They were literally using Newton to try to upend Newton. That's irony. In the end, though, the data from Príncipe and the data from Sobral agreed: the stars were simply... not where Newton said they should be by *precisely* 1.75 [arcseconds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minute%5Fand%5Fsecond%5Fof%5Farc?ref=absurdia.xyz). The width of practically nothing at all. Except it was *everything*. Einstein was right. Space bends. Now, Newton wasn't *destroyed* by this. He wasn't even really *wrong*. What Newton had done was build the ground floor of a *much* larger building. The problem was, everyone had become so *comfortable* living in the room he built they hadn't bothered to check for doors that might lead to *even more* rooms in the house. Or even a fire escape. But that's not what strikes me. What does is the absurdity of the whole enterprise. Nobody *had* to do this. Nobody was forced to load equipment onto ships and send it across oceans. Nobody was required to haul telescopes through swamps and tropical heat to chase a fleeting shadow through two hemispheres. The universe *certainly* didn't *owe* them anything. It could have hidden behind clouds in Príncipe, and almost did. It could have ruined the observations in Brazil, and it almost did that, too. But somehow, hidden inside a handful of photos that very nearly didn't get made was the evidence that the architecture of reality was *completely different* from what everyone had previously thought. Except for Einstein. That's astonishing to me. It's *awesome*. But that's apparently what humans do. We become suspicious that the room we've occupied our entire lives might contain a door, and instead of shrugging and getting on with our day, we build telescopes, pack crates, cross oceans, wait for eclipses, and gamble centuries of certainty on a discrepancy so small most people can't even imagine it. We become Sisyphus. We become heroic. And all for the chance to discover that the room wasn't a room after all. It was just the *first* room. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2e/f4/2ef499d4-e94b-4b36-987c-da9be1bf2b17/content/images/2026/08/M-smallsig-6.png)