Category: Eclipses

The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

Maurice Allais – Nobel economist (1911–2010) who spent fifty-eight years on a pendulum and defended another man's data against the explanation that later took his own.
Eclipse – Announced to the second, centuries ahead, on a named strip of ground. The one term that cannot be computed is how fast the Earth will be turning.
General relativity – A theory of gravitation containing no force of gravity, built out of the fact that a falling man feels nothing at all.
Moon – The Earth's satellite, and its measuring instrument: one face turned to us, and the wrong reading of its density once hollowed out the planet.
Selenelion – The Sun and the totally eclipsed Moon seen at once, from opposite horizons, in a geometry that places them exactly opposite and therefore forbids it.
Sun – The nearest star, and the one this encyclopedia keeps calling as a witness: never quite where it is seen, and gone from the horizon before it looks it.
Vulcan – A planet announced, named, decorated and assigned an orbit to the arcminute, between Mercury and the Sun, that was never there.