In the early morning hours (US time) this Friday, March 14 the moon will make a journey through Earth’s umbral shadow, displaying an ochre reddish tint during the latest total lunar eclipse to dazzle skywatchers in the Americas.
What you might not know is that this blood moon (the nickname comes from that reddish tint caused by the scattering of sunlight through Earth’s atmosphere during a lunar eclipse) shares a special day with a scientific giant who built his legend in part because of another eclipse.
March 14 is also Albert Einstein’s birthday. The human who is perhaps more associated with intellectual genius than anyone else in history was born in Germany on March 14, 1879.
The Eclipse That Made Einstein A True Einstein
A little over 40 years later in 1919, a team of scientists would document another total eclipse – this one a solar eclipse – from both sides of the Atlantic. Sir Arthur Eddington’s team sought to take advantage of the daytime darkness provided by the eclipse to observe and photograph stars nearest the sun at the moment. The whole point of the exercise was to test Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, introduced by the emerging theoretical physicist in 1915.
BRAZIL - APRIL 27: Photograph (bromide print) showing the instruments used by the British ... [+] expedition sent to observe total solar eclipse on 29 May 1919 from Sobral in Brazil. Sir Arthur Eddington at Cambridge University organised the eclipse trip to try and test Einstein's Theory of Relativity. During the event, two heliostats with moveable mirrors were used to direct images of the eclipsed Sun into a pair of horizontal telescopes. Measurement of photographs taken through these instruments was checked for any deflection of star positions adjacent to the Sun. Einstein suggested that the large mass of a star like our Sun would bend the path of any starlight if it passed close-by. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)SSPL via Getty Images
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Einstein’s theory revolutionized humanity’s understanding of gravity and the cosmos. One of its key predictions was that massive bodies like stars can literally bend light that passes near them. If true, this would mean that the position of stars observed from Earth would appear slightly shifted when they were near the sun from our perspective.
The total solar eclipse of May 29, 1919 provided an opportunity to test the theory. Eddington did just this from two locations with good views of the event, in Brazil and off the coast of West Africa. Not only did the resulting observations show that stars near the sun were shifted just as General Relativity predicted, but the measurement of how far they were shifted almost exactly matched Einstein’s calculation.
BRAZIL : Glass positive photograph of the corona, taken at Sobral in Brazil, with a telescope of 4 ... [+] inches in aperture and 19 feet focal length. The expedition, organised by physicist Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944) of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, used photographs taken during the eclipse to measure the deflection of star light adjacent to the Sun as predicted by Albert Einstein (1879-1955) in his Theory of Relativity. The year 2005 marked the centenary of publication of Einstein?s Special Relativity Theory which posited that time does not exist at the same rate for everyone and everything. Special Relativity produced the equation which expresses the equivalence between matter and energy: E=mc squared. This image was donated to the Science Museum by the Greenwich Royal Observatory. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)SSPL via Getty Images
The result was rocket fuel for Einstein’s career, setting him on the trajectory to become the titan of science we all know him as today.
As far as I can tell, the last total eclipse on Einstein’s birthday actually came before his birth in 1820 and another one isn’t expected anytime this century. So this is likely our only opportunity to honor a big brain by viewing a total eclipse, even if it isn’t exactly the same sort that catapulted him into history.