believe had occurred," Twomey says. "Whether he was stunned or whether he had knowledge, we don't know. Only Peter Crompton could tell you that."

And something strange happened while court investigator David Cooper was breaking the bad news to Crompton that day, comments Taft.

Cooper and Crompton were having a conversation in Crompton's Boca Raton residence when there was a knock at the door. Crompton went outside and talked to someone for about five minutes, Twomey says. Cooper couldn't identify the man but saw him drive away in a BMW convertible. Afterward Cooper spotted the same car parked outside the Lion & Eagle, a Boca Raton pub owned by Crompton. They wrote down the car's tag number and ran it when they got back to the office. "The license platetook many wrong turns. From 1907 to 1914 he struggled with what the physicist Abraham Pais called “one of the hardest problems of the century” — explaining gravity in a way that permits the laws of nature to be the same for all observers, no matter how they are moving. Einstein had to learn new math and jettison common prejudices, such as the universal belief that Euclidean geometry described reality accurately. He struggled with distractions, both in his personal life and in physics problems posed by quantum theory. And he found that nature stubbornly refused to cooperate. By 1914 he had essentially given up, believing that a partially successful attempt — a sort of general relativity lite — was the best that nature would allow.

But then somehow Einstein’s