Quote of the Day (Paul Johnson, on How the ‘Modern World’ Began With Einstein’s Relativity Theory)

“The modern world began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a solar eclipse, taken on the island of Principe off West Africa and at Sobral in Brazil, confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe….

“In 1905, a 26-year-old German Jew, Albert Einstein, had published a paper which became known as the Special Theory of Relativity…. 

“Einstein's theory, and [Cambridge Professor Arthur] Eddington's much publicized expedition to test it [during the eclipse], aroused enormous interest throughout the world in 1919. No exercise in scientific verification, before or since, has ever attracted so many headlines or become a topic of universal conversation.”—English historian and journalist Paul Johnson, Modern Times, Revised Edition: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (2001)