him to prepare two expeditions to the equator. One, which he led, would go to the island of Principe, off the west coast of Africa, and the other group would set off for Sobral, in the north of Brazil. According to Eddington’s calculations, both were ideal points from which to measure the shift that would occur when rays of starlight approached the sun. This, following Einstein’s calculations, would be 1.745 seconds of arc—double the estimate produced by traditional physics. With Dyson’s support, Eddington left for Príncipe in March.
On May 29, the day of the eclipse, Eddington arose at dawn and discovered, to his dismay, that a stubborn layer of clouds was now perched directly over the island and seemed determined to ruin his plans. After all his preparations and hard work, Nature herself seemed poised to betray her students. There was the hope, however, that the team in Sobral would be able to obtain results, but even that wasn’t enough to lift the astronomer’s spirits. Eddington cared not for the glory that the experiment could bring him, but the pride of being the first to prove this radical, new notion of what the world was. It was as if fate had played a cruel practical joke at his expense: After a few minutes, the clouds gave way to one of the most violent thunderstorms Eddington had ever seen in his entire life. The thunder reverberated in his ears like dry claps of artillery fire. If things kept going like this, the only curvature they would measure would be that of the stooped-over palm trees fighting the hurricane winds. The telescopes, the cameras, and all the other measuring instruments remained where they were, exposed to the elements, useless and defenseless against the explosions that rained down from the heavens.
By 1:30 in the afternoon, Eddington, despondent, was about ready to surrender. That was when the miracle occurred: Suddenly the clouds began to disperse, aided by a cool breeze. With only eight minutes to go before the eclipse, Eddington quickly rallied his group, all of them inspired by the sensation that they had been granted the great privilege of observing the history of the universe compressed into a few brief seconds. The sun appeared, radiant and soaring, only to be devoured moments later by the shadows of its rival, the moon. Amid this inconceivable noontime darkness, the dumbstruck birds quickly flew back into their nests while the monkeys and lizards settled in for an early night’s sleep. The momentary twilight seemed enveloped in a magical, white silence. In perfect harmony, the cameras captured the moment.
During the three days that followed, Eddington locked himself away in an improvised darkroom to develop the sixteen photograms that he had taken in order to carry out the necessary calculations. The instant Eddington spied the first images taking shape from beneath the photographic solution, like lost spectra floating in the water, he knew that success was his. After double-checking the calculations several times, Eddington emerged from his inner sanctum with the pride of a bishop prepared to crown anew king. The result was conclusive, despite the tiniest margin of error: Einstein had been triumphant! It took a few weeks for the news to travel the globe, and it wasn’t until November 10, 1919, almost six months after the experiment, after new measurements were taken, that it appeared in the New York Times.
At 7:30 that very same morning, in a small hospital in Newark, New Jersey, not far from Princeton, a baby was born. This child, in a way the first inhabitant of a new universe, would be baptized Francis Percy Bacon, son of Charles Drexter Bacon, owner of the Albany Department Store chain, and his wife, Rachel Richards, the daughter of banker Raymond Richards, of New Canaan, Connecticut.
One June afternoon several years later, Bacon’s mother decided to teach her son how to count. She placed him in her lap and in the same indifferent voice she used for reading him bedtime stories about angels and monsters, she revealed to him the secrets of mathematics, whispering each numeral as if it were a station of the cross or a psalm inserted into her prayers. Just outside the window, a tree struggled against the first summer thundershower, and the violent gusts of wind and rain reminded them of God’s presence and mercy. That day, Frank found a solution to the tempests and discovered, moreover, that numbers are sometimes better companions than people. Unlike human beings—he was thinking of his father’s sudden fits of temper and his mother’s cool, distant reserve—you could always rely on numbers. They are constant, he thought, and they didn’t suffer from mood swings. They didn’t ever cheat or betray, and they didn’t pick on little boys for being scrawny and weak.
Years went by before he realized, during an intense bout of fever, that all sorts of disorders and neuroses were hidden behind the great world of numbers. Contrary to what he had initially thought, he soon realized that numbers did not belong to such a simple, unemotional realm. As the doctor bathed Frank’s feverish, delirious body in ice cubes, the young patient’s secret passions were suddenly awakened for the very first time. Frank watched in awe as the numbers fought among themselves with a determination that refused to surrender—just like many of the real-life men he had read about. He studied their varied behavioral patterns: They loved one another within parentheses, they had illicit sex in multiplication, they annihilated one another in subtractions, they built palaces with their Pythagorean solids, they danced from place to place on their Euclidean planes, they dreamed of Utopias with differential calculus, and condemned one another to death in the vortex of square roots. Their hell was far worse than what awaited humans: Rather than languishing somewhere below zero, in the negative numbers—a stupid, infantile simplification—numbers could fall into paradoxes, anomalies, tautologies, and the painful limbo of probability.
From that moment on, numerical inventions were Frank’s best friends. To him, they were the last vestige of real, existential truth. Only those people who were unfamiliar with them—like his father and the doctors—could think they were perverse, opportunistic creatures. They were wrong—numbers didn’t devour the brain or turn life into a sluggish lump of mathematical conjecture. Anyway, Frank hadn’t renounced the laws of man in favor of the dictums of logic; he was just reluctant to abdicate the kingdom of geometry, for that would force him to return, dolefully, to the miserable routine of his home life.
Frank was five years old when he was first seduced by the demons of algebra. His mother had found him in the basement of their New Jersey home, numb from the November frost, mesmerized by the pipes that ran around the perimeter of the room. A thick, frothy saliva bubbled at his lips, and his body had become stiff as a bamboo shoot. After consulting with a neurologist, Frank’s doctor determined that the only medicine was patience. “It’s as if he were sleeping,” he added, unable to explain the state his patient was in, somewhere between hypnotic and autistic. It took a day and a half before Frank fulfilled the doctor’s prediction. Just as the doctor had said, Frank began to paw at his bed rail, like a butterfly trying to break out of its cocoon. His mother, who had maintained a bedside vigil throughout the episode, embraced her son, convinced that her love for him had rescued him from death’s door. Minutes later, however, when he finally began to move his lips, the young boy put this wayward notion to rest. “I was just trying to solve an equation,” he confessed, to everyone’s surprise. Then he smiled: “And I did.”
In his whole life, Frank received only one gift from his father, and the memory of this occasion would always be a special, private treasure for him. He must have been about six years old when, one Sunday afternoon, without any previous warning, the old man got up from his chair and handed his son a dusty black leather box. For years he had kept it hidden away in a closet, like a secret inheritance, the greatest lesson he could pass on to his son. To Frank’s shock and delight, Charles Bacon removed a most curious collection of figurines from this box: dragons, samurai, bonzos, and pagodas, which he insisted upon calling horses, pawns, bishops, and rooks. He also took out a beautiful ebony and marble board which he then placed upon the parlor table.
Frank, at first, didn’t quite understand his father’s momentary euphoria, nor did he comprehend why his father was suddenly so interested in taking the time to show him the way to execute checks, count the horses’ moves, and construct those bizarre, labyrinthine schemes known as castlings. At his age, how could he have possibly known that this game was the one thing that allowed the aging Charles to relive a bit of his former glory? Those harmless, board-game battles, of course, were really nothing more than a simple imitation of the battles
