The message in this caprice of nature has been read many ways. In times gone by, solar eclipses provoked visions of doom and people locked themselves indoor and waited for the ominous hour to pass. In India lakhs of pilgrims still flock to Kurukshetra on the appointed day to wash away their accumulated sins with a holy dip. But in our age of reason, total eclipses -- besides giving tourists without a destination an excuse to pile into a Concorde and chase the solar shadow -- provide scientists with a precious two minutes to validate theory with experiment. The most famous case in solar eclipse folklore is Einstein's mindboggling intellectual leap, the general theory of relativity, which among other things predicted that the sun's gravity should bend light rays from stars. In 1919 astronomer Arthur Eddingtonphotographed stars before and after an eclipse, and famously claimed to have proved Einstein's contention, only for it to be later shown that he had hushed inconvenient observations. It's a different matter that later eclipses provided scientists with clinching data.

But as the lucky ones gaze into the distance, they will have more on their minds than mundane queries like why is the sun's corona thousands of degrees hotter than its surface (a still unsolved mystery) and how helium was discovered one eclipse day in 1868. In that illuminating darkness, they will no doubt ponder over the logic written into nature itself, and man's capacity to read this code. Why are the workings of nature so easily intelligible in the language of mathematics? Is mathematics a human construct, a convenient and accurate tool to make sense of the world around us, or is it woven into the very fabric of the cosmos? There is more to cosmic coincidences than occasioning media events and millennium tourism, they are periodic remindersof the eternal magic of science.