The press had called it E-day. It was a unique event, not seen before in Britain for over 70 years and it was going to happen over Cornwall on August 11th 1999 at around 11am. It was, of course, a total eclipse of the sun and I was ready for it, in the Lake District, around 600 miles north from ground zero, but still with a reasonable view. As it turned out, most of Cornwall was in cloud when it happened but we had a good view on Brant Fell, just outside Bowness by Lake Windermere. Smug in the thought that a 90% eclipse in clear sky over the Lakes was better than a 100% eclipse lost in the Cornish clouds I stood with my family, plastic dark glasses (courtesy of a tabloid newspaper) and pin-hole projection device made from a cereal box at the ready. It didn't disappoint. We got our cosmic performance, oo-ed and aah-ed for a few minutes, then followed the sated crowd back into town for lunch.

We tend to take such things for granted, an entertainment to slot alongside the CGI-laden movies and technical wizardry of sci-fi dramas on the TV. Yet this was no illusion brought about by the manipulation of photons by indulged technicians, this was real life, a mother nature production and free!

Yet, if we only realised it, a total eclipse is a totally unlikely event, not just because it hardly happens because of the necessary celestial alignments, but because it happens at all! Patrick Moore, that monacled eccentric (and probably the finest amateur astronomer of modern times) calls it "unquestionably the finest display in all Nature" but he also says that the fact that it happens at all is "pure chance".

A total eclipse of the sun only happens because, from our perspective peering at the skies, the sun and moon seem to be about the same size, so that when the moon passes exactly in front of the sun, it blots it out to our eyes, the ultimate sun block! That's what a total eclipse is, it's simple really. There's nothing magical about that if, indeed, the sun and moon are the same size. But they are not. The sun is around 400 times larger than the moon and the only reason they seem to be the same size is that the sun is around 400 times further away from us. If the moon was 5% smaller or larger or the sun was 5% smaller or larger then there could never be a total eclipse. Or if the moon or sun were 5% nearer or further. It's a fine balance here, a slight nudge either away would deprive us of this "finest display in all Nature".

So what? You may ask. After all, eclipses have had a bad press in earlier days. They have generally been seen as portents of doom. Not surprising really as you don't expect to see a dark star-lit sky in the middle of the day time unless something dastardly was about to happen. That was the thinking in earlier times, when the phenomenon was seen as the sun abandoning the earth, usually as a result of being gulped up by a dragon or demon. The ancient Chinese used to bang away on drums to frighten away the dragon. The Incas used to fire arrows at the sky. Of course they were successful, as the sun was rescued as the eclipse finished. They had no reason to believe otherwise.

Then the scientists came along to sweet-talk us out of our panic and tell us that it's not the work of angry gods or demons, but rather a trick of geometry. This inclines us to think that maybe we are better off without such natural phenomena, but something still nags at me.

"The finest display in all Nature"

Surely this is reason enough. Only if such things matter to you, otherwise we just shrug our shoulders, mutter "seen that, done that" and carve a fresh notch on our personal bedpost of life. It may not seem important to you but surely it's worth a brief consideration. To the scientific community total eclipses have a further importance. In fact a whole scientific discipline, star astrophysics, was birthed in the late 19th century simply out of the data that is provided by observing the sun's surface during a total eclipse. Also, data produced at the 1919 eclipse helped to verify Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. So it's not just touchy feely stuff here, we're also looking at the cold world of hard facts benefiting from this "amazing co-incidence" of factors working together to produce this phenomenon.

I've always wanted to see the Aurora Borealis, but live too far south ever to have seen it. Of course that's why they are called the 'Northern Lights'. Yet my brain tells me that it's just an atmospheric effect caused by the solar wind, an accident of optics just like the eclipse is an accident of geometry. But my heart tells me otherwise and convinces me that there are some things in life worth experiencing just for what they are, just as if they have been put in our world for that very purpose. Things that draw us out of our humdrum lives and fill us with wonder. And if such things as a total eclipse of the sun are so improbable that their very existence hangs on a thread statistically speaking, then we should appreciate them even more.

This book nudges us to consider such things as eclipses and the aurora borealis. To get to the heart of what is going on in the World, we must use all of our senses. We are not just brains on legs, there's more to us than that. Perhaps thinking deeper about this thing called the eclipse is a good place to start …