Arthur Stanley Eddington Quotes

#1. If the laws of physics are not strictly causal the most that can be said is that the behaviour of the conscious brain is one of the possible behaviours of a mechanical brain. Precisely so; and the decision between the possible behaviours is what we call volition.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#2. 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.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#3. I believe that there are 15,747,724,136,275,02,577,605,653,961,181,555,468,044,717,914,527,116,709,366,231,425,076,185,631,031,296 protons in the universe and the same number of electrons.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#4. We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because 'two' is 'one and one'. We forget that we have still to make a study of 'and'.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#5. Out of the numbers proceeds that harmony of natural law which it is the aim of science to disclose. We can grasp the tune but not the player. Trinculo might have been referring to modern physics in the words: 'This is the tune of our catch, played by the picture of Nobody.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#6. The more perfect the instrument as a measurer of time, the more completely does it conceal time's arrow.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#7. The simpler elements of the scientific world have no immediate counterparts in everyday experience; we use them to build things which have counterparts.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#8. Just as we were misled into untenable ideas of the aether through trusting to an analogy with the material ocean, so we have been misled into untenable ideas of the attributes of the microscopic elements of world-structure through trusting to analogy with gross particles.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#9. 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.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#10. We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#11. The cleavage between the scientific and the extra-scientific domain of experience is, I believe, not a cleavage between the concrete and the transcendental but between the metrical and the non-metrical.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#12. An individual is a four-dimensional objectof greatly elongated form; in ordinary language we say he has considerable extension in time and insignificant extension in space.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#13. 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?

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#14. Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#15. It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#16. We take as building material relations and relata. The relations unite the relata; the relata are the meeting-points of the relations. The one is unthinkable apart from the other. I do not think that a more general starting-point of structure could be conceived.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#17. Better admit that there was some truth both in science and religion; and if they must fight, let it be elsewhere than in the brain of a hard-working scientist.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#18. The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#19. The determinism of the physical laws simply reflects the determinism of the method of inference. This soulless nature of the scientific world need not worry those who are persuaded that the main significances of our environment are of a more spiritual character.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#20. It would probably be wiser to nail up over the door of the new quantum theory a notice, 'Structural alterations in progress - No admittance except on business', and particularly to warn the doorkeeper to keep out prying philosophers.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#21. An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#22. We are all of us clocks whose faces tell the passing years.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#23. Never trust an experimental result until it has been confirmed by theory

Arthur Stanley Eddington