So this is what it is like to play cosmic pinball. The worlds move, and sometimes they line up. Then you find yourself staring up the tube of blackness that is the moon’s shadow, a sudden hole in the sky during a total solar eclipse.

Such moments have left their marks on human consciousness — like the monoliths in the classic movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey” — since before history was recorded.

Few eclipses have had more impact on modern history than the one that occurred on May 29, 1919, more than six minutes of darkness sweeping across South America and across the Atlantic to Africa. It was during that eclipse that the British astronomer Arthur Eddington ascertained that the light rays from distant stars had been wrenched off their paths by the gravitational field of the sun.

That affirmed the prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, ascribing gravity to a warp in the geometry of space-time, that gravity could bend light beams. “Lights All Askew in the Heavens,” read a headline in this newspaper.