Eddington had also been involved in ideas about the evolution of stars, based on work that showed them to consist of giants and dwarves. Giants are in general less dense than dwarves, which, according to Eddington’s calculations, could be up to 20 million degrees Kelvin at their centre, with a density of one ton per cubic inch. But Eddington was also a keen traveller and had visited Brazil and Malta to study eclipses. His work and his academic standing thus made him the obvious choice when the Physical Society of London, during wartime, wanted someone to prepare a Report on the Relativity Theory of Gravitation.57 This, which appeared in 1918, was the first complete account of general relativity to be published in English. Eddington had already received a copy of Einstein’s 1915 paper from Holland, so he was well prepared, and his report attracted widespread attention, so much so that Sir Frank Dyson, the Astronomer Royal, offered an unusual opportunity to test Einstein’s theory. On 29 May 1919, there was to be a total eclipse. This offered the chance to assess if, as Einstein predicted, light rays were bent as they passed near the sun. It says something for the Astronomer Royal’s influence that, during the last full year of the war, Dyson obtained from the government a grant of £1,000 to mount not one but two expeditions, to Principe off the coast of West Africa and to Sobral, across the Atlantic, in Brazil.58
Eddington was given Principe, together with E. T. Cottingham. In the Astronomer Royal’s study on the night before they left, Eddington, Cottingham, and Dyson sat up late calculating how far light would have to be deflected for Einstein’s theory to be confirmed. At one point, Cottingham asked rhetorically what would happen if they found twice the expected value. Drily, Dyson replied, ‘Then Eddington will go mad and you will have to come home alone!’59 Eddington’s own notebooks continue the account: ‘We sailed early in March to Lisbon. At Funchal we saw [the other two astronomers] off to Brazil on March 16, but we had to remain until April 9 … and got our first sight of Principe in the morning of April 23…. We soon found we were in clover, everyone anxious to give every help we needed … about May 16 we had no difficulty in getting the check photographs on three different nights. I had a good deal of work measuring these.’ Then the weather changed. On the morning of 29 May, the day of the eclipse, the heavens opened, the downpour lasted for hours, and Eddington began to fear that their arduous journey was a waste of time. However, at one-thirty in the afternoon, by which time the partial phase of the eclipse had already begun, the clouds at last began to clear. ‘I did not see the eclipse,’ Eddington wrote later, ‘being too busy changing plates, except for one glance to make sure it had begun and another half-way through to see how much cloud there was. We took sixteen photographs. They are all good of the sun, showing a very remarkable prominence; but the cloud has interfered with the star images. The last six photographs show a few images which I hope will give us what we need…. June 3. We developed the photographs, 2 each night for 6 nights after the eclipse, and I spent the whole day measuring. The cloudy weather upset my plans…. But the one plate that I measured gave a result agreeing with Einstein.’ Eddington turned to his companion. ‘Cottingham,’ he said, ‘you won’t have to go home alone.’60
Eddington later described the experiment off West Africa as ‘the greatest moment of my life.’61 Einstein had set three tests for relativity, and now two of them had supported his ideas. Eddington wrote to Einstein immediately, giving him a complete account and a copy of his calculations. Einstein wrote back from Berlin on 15 December 1919, ‘Lieber Herr Eddington, Above all I should like to congratulate you on the success of your difficult expedition. Considering the great interest you have taken in the theory of relativity even in earlier days I think I can assume that we are indebted primarily to your initiative for the fact that these expeditions could take place. I am amazed at the interest which my English colleagues have taken in the theory in spite of its difficulty.’62
Einstein was being disingenuous. The publicity given to Eddington’s confirmation of relativity made Einstein the most famous scientist in the world. ‘EINSTEIN THEORY TRIUMPHS’ blazed the headline in the New York Times, and many other newspapers around the world treated the episode in the same way. The Royal Society convened a special session in London at which Frank Dyson gave a full account of the expeditions to Sobral and Principe.63 Alfred North Whitehead was there, and in his book Science and the Modern World, though reluctant to commit himself to print, he relayed some of the excitement: ‘The whole atmosphere of tense interest was exactly that of the Greek drama: we were the chorus commenting on the decree of destiny as disclosed in the development of a supreme incident. There was dramatic quality in the very staging: – the traditional ceremonial, and in the background the picture of Newton to remind us that the greatest of scientific generalisations was now, after more than two centuries, to receive its first modification. Nor was the personal interest wanting: a great adventure in thought had at length come safe to shore.’64
Relativity theory had not found universal acceptance when Einstein had first proposed it. Eddington’s Principe observations were therefore the point at which many scientists were forced to concede that this exceedingly uncommon idea about the physical world was, in fact, true. Thought would never be the same again. Common sense very definitely had its limitations. And Eddington’s, or rather Dyson’s, timing was perfect. In more ways than one, the old world had been eclipsed.
11
THE ACQUISITIVE WASTELAND
Much of the thought of the 1920s, and almost all of the important literature, may be seen, unsurprisingly perhaps, as a response to World War I. Not so predictable was that so many authors should respond in the same way – by emphasising their break with the past through new forms of literature: novels, plays, and poems in which the way the story was told was as important as the story itself. It took a while for authors to digest what had happened in the war, to grasp what it signified, and what they felt about it. But then, in 1922, a year to rival 1913 as an annus mirabilis in thought, there was a flood of works that broke new ground: James Joyce’s Ulysses; T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land; Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt; Marcel Proust’s ninth volume of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Sodome et Gomorrhe II; Virginia Woolf’s first experimental novel, Jacob’s Room; Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies; and Pirandello’s Henry IV, all foundation stones for the architecture of the literature of the century.