A Crack in the Cosmos

Summary

Some time around the year 466 BCE – in the second year of the 78th Olympiad, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder tells us – a massive meteor blazed across the sky in broad daylight, crashing to the earth with an enormous explosion near the small Greek town of Aegospotami, or ‘Goat Rivers’, on the European side of the Hellespont in northeastern Greece. Pliny’s younger contemporary, the Greek biographer Plutarch, wrote that the locals still worshipped the scorched brownish metallic boulder, the size of a wagon-load, that was left after the explosion; it remained on display in Pliny and Plutarch’s time, five centuries later. Both writers connect the meteorite with the Greek scientist Anaxagoras, who had a widely-known theory that heavenly bodies are made of the same sort of matter found on earth. The amazed Greeks took the stone as spectacular confirmation of this crazy idea, and Anaxagoras’s name would be linked to it forever afterward. To get a better idea of this meteorite’s figurative impact, consider a parallel from closer to our own time. Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity in 1915, a decade after the narrower special theory of relativity had established a secure scientific reputation for him, along with other important papers he published in 1905, his annus mirabilis. Few physicists could follow the ins and outs of general relativity, and its immediate influence was slight. But one of those few was Arthur Eddington, whose widely publicised 1919 observations of a solar eclipse appeared to confirm Einstein’s revolutionary prediction that gravity bends light. ‘LIGHTS ALL ASKEW IN THE HEAVENS’ ran the delightful headline in The New York Times. ‘Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations. EINSTEIN THEORY TRIUMPHS.’ Overnight, Einstein’s name became synonymous with genius; two years later he won a Nobel Prize. If we took that level of agog and multiplied it hundredfold, we might begin to approach the shockwave of the ...