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for cycling long distances. He had devised a number, E, that encapsulated his cycling stamina. E was, put simply, the largest number of days in his life that he had cycled more than E miles. I doubt I have an E number greater than 5 or 6. I haven’t biked six miles in a day more than six times in my life—a pathetic number, I know. When Eddington died, he had an E number of 87, which means he had taken eighty-seven individual bike rides that were longer than eighty-seven miles. His unique stamina and perseverance served him well and would push him to achieve quite spectacular results in all walks of life.
    Whereas Einstein had struggled to begin his scientific career, Eddington had been fast-tracked into the heart of English academia. Eddington could be arrogant, dismissive, and disconcertingly stubborn when promoting his own ideas, but he was also a tenacious scientist who was rarely put off by fiendishly difficult astronomical observations or new esoteric mathematics. He had been brought up in a devout Quaker family and from early on had excelled at school. At sixteen he went to Manchester to study mathematics and physics and ended up in Cambridge, where he was the top-scoring student of his year, known as the “Senior Wrangler.” On finishing his MA, he was almost immediately made an assistant to the Astronomer Royal and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
    Cambridge was high octane, and Eddington was surrounded by brilliant scholars. There was J. J. Thomson, who had discovered the electron, and A. N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, who together had written the
Principia Mathematica,
a true bible for logicians. Over time he would be joined by Ernest Rutherford, Ralph Fowler, Paul Dirac, and a veritable who’s who of twentieth-century physics. Eddington fit right in. After spending a few years at the Greenwich Observatory in London, he returned to Cambridge. At only thirty-one years of age, he was appointed to the prestigious position of Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He was also appointed director of the Cambridge Observatory on the outskirts of town, and he settled there with his sister and his mother to become the leader of British astronomy. Eddington would remain there for the rest of his life, taking part in college life with its formal dinners and staid debates, regularly visiting the Royal Astronomical Society to present his results, and every now and then traveling to some far corner of the world to make measurements and observe the skies.
    It was on one such trip that Eddington first came across Einstein’s new ideas on gravity. Einstein’s proposed bending of light had caught the fancy of a few astronomers who had taken it upon themselves to try to measure it. They would set off across the globe, to America, Russia, and Brazil, trying to capture an eclipse at just the right moment and with the sun in the right position so that they could measure the slight deflections of distant stars. While observing an eclipse in Brazil, Eddington met one such astronomer, the American Charles Perrine, and was intrigued by what he was doing. So when he returned to Cambridge, Eddington decided to look into Einstein’s new ideas.
    When the Great War broke out, Eddington was one of the lone voices opposing the wave of rabid nationalism that was subsuming not only his country but his colleagues. It drove him to despair. In a series of angry pieces in
The Observatory,
the mouthpiece of British astronomers, the case against working with German scientists was made forcefully by a slew of senior astronomers. The Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, Herbert Turner, put it succinctly:“We can readmit Germany to international society and lower our standards of international law to her level or we can exclude her and raise it. There is no third way.” Such was the animosity against anything German that the president of the Royal