Arthur Eddington
Arthur Eddington
Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington OM FRSwas an English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician of the early 20th century who did his greatest work in astrophysics. He was also a philosopher of science and a popularizer of science. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars, or the radiation generated by accretion onto a compact object, is named in his honor...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth28 December 1882
four world quests
The quest of the absolute leads into the four-dimensional world.
book writing army
If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel.
cat would-be physics
To the pure geometer the radius of curvature is an incidental characteristic - like the grin of the Cheshire cat. To the physicist it is an indispensable characteristic. It would be going too far to say that to the physicist the cat is merely incidental to the grin. Physics is concerned with interrelatedness such as the interrelatedness of cats and grins. In this case the "cat without a grin" and the "grin without a cat" are equally set aside as purely mathematical phantasies.
shuffling
Shuffling is the only thing which Nature cannot undo.
science verbs physics
In the most modern theories of physics probability seems to have replaced aether as "the nominative of the verb 'to undulate'."
science people understanding
Asked in 1919 whether it was true that only three people in the world understood the theory of general relativity, [Eddington] allegedly replied: "Who's the third?"
science together add
Observation and theory get on best when they are mixed together, both helping one another in the pursuit of truth. It is a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in a theory until it has been confirmed by observation. I hope I shall not shock the experimental physicists too much if I add that it is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they have been confirmed by theory.
law time-management supreme
Time is the supreme Law of nature.
nature light intellectual
Whether in the intellectual pursuits of science or in the mystical pursuits of the spirit, the light beckons ahead, and the purpose surging in our nature responds.
stars atheism matter
We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.
thinking mathematical-logic two
We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and'.
stars flower petals
You cannot disturb the tiniest petal of a flower without the troubling of a distant star.
stars important looks
I ask you to look both ways. For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.
science law giving
If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations-then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation-well these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.