a lecture which changed her life. She wrote, “My world had been so shaken that I experienced something very like a nervous breakdown.” She had gone to hear Sir Arthur Eddington’s account of his 1919 expedition to the island of Principe to photograph stars with apparent positions near the sun during

the solar eclipse. He had produced the first experimental evidence supporting Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which predicted that large masses like the sun would bend spacetime itself & that gravity would bend light changing apparent position of stars. Payne’s imagination was captured by 🧵