Top 82 Eddington Quotes
#1. On one occasion when [William] Smart found him engrossed with his fundamental theory, he asked Eddington how many people he thought would understand what he was writing-after a pause came the reply, 'Perhaps seven.'
Arthur Eddington
#2. Sir Arthur Eddington deduces religion from the fact that atoms do not obey the laws of mathematics. Sir James Jeans deduces it from the fact that they do.
Bertrand Russell
#3. 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
#4. Sir Arthur Eddington summed up the situation brilliantly in his book The Nature of the Physical World, published in 1929. "No familiar conceptions can be woven around the electron," he said, and our best description of the atom boils down to "something unknown is doing we don't know what".
John Gribbin
#5. (According to some accounts, a journalist told Eddington in the early 1920s that he had heard there were only three people in the world who understood general relativity. Eddington paused, then replied, "I am trying to think who the third person is.")
Stephen Hawking
#6. The founders and grand theorists of modern (quantum and relativity) physics: Einstein, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Eddington, Pauli, de Broglie, Jeans, and Planck.
Ken Wilber
#7. I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among "real" mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are at present at any rate, almost as "useless" as the theory of numbers.
G.H. Hardy
#8. Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to me ... I should like to find a genuine loophole.
Arthur Eddington
#9. It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.
Arthur Stanley Eddington
#10. A hundred thousand million Stars make one Galaxy; A hundred thousand million Galaxies make one Universe. The figures may not be very trustworthy, but I think they give a correct impression.
Arthur Eddington
#11. When an investigator has developed a formula which gives a complete representation of the phenomena within a certain range, he may be prone to satisfaction. Would it not be wiser if he should say 'Foiled again! I can find out no more about Nature along this line.'
Arthur Eddington
#13. Electrical force is defined as something which causes motion of electrical charge; an electrical charge is something which exerts electric force.
Arthur Eddington
#14. For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal.
Arthur Eddington
#15. Whatever else there may be in our nature, responsibility toward truth is one of its attributes.
Arthur Eddington
#16. The pursuit of truth in science transcends national boundaries. It takes us beyond hatred and anger and fear. It is the best of us.
Arthur Eddington
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. There is no space without aether, and no aether which does not occupy space.
Arthur Eddington
#20. In the most modern theories of physics probability seems to have replaced aether as "the nominative of the verb 'to undulate'."
Arthur Eddington
#21. Human life is proverbially uncertain; few things are more certain than the solvency of a life-insurance company.
Arthur Eddington
#22. What we makes of the world must be largely dependent on the sense-organs that we happen to possess. How the world must have changed since the man came to rely on his eyes rather than his nose.
Arthur Eddington
#23. Life would be stunted and narrow if we could feel no significance in the world around us beyond that which can be weighed and measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician.
Arthur Eddington
#24. It is a primitive form of thought that things exist or do not exist.
Arthur Eddington
#25. Something unknown is doing we don't know what-that is what our theory amounts to.
Arthur Eddington
#27. We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind put into nature.
Arthur Eddington
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. There was a time when we wanted to be told what an electron is. The question was never answered. No familiar conceptions can be woven around the electron; it belongs to the waiting list.
Arthur Eddington
#35. The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness.
Arthur Stanley Eddington
#36. 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
#37. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them.
Arthur Eddington
#38. I am aware that many critics consider the conditions in the stars not sufficiently extreme ... the stars are not hot enough. The critics lay themselves open to an obvious retort: we tell them to go and find a hotter place.
Arthur Eddington
#40. What is possible in the Cavendish Laboratory may not be too difficult in the sun.
Arthur Eddington
#42. Falling in love is one of the activities forbidden that tiresome person, the consistently reasonable man.
Arthur Eddington
#43. It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has no control.
Arthur Eddington
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. America, the land of the free, is turning itself into the land of the free ride. [U.S. airlines] are operating in protected markets. They are hoovering up public funds and they still can't make a profit.
Rod Eddington
#48. Probably the simplest hypothesis ... is that there may be a slow process of annihilation of matter.
Arthur Eddington
#50. An electron is no more (and no less) hypothetical than a star. Nowadays we count electrons one by one in a Geiger counter, as we count the stars one by one on a photographic plate.
Arthur Eddington
#51. Oh leave the Wise our measures to collate. One thing at least is certain, light has weight. One thing is certain and the rest debate. Light rays, when near the Sun, do not go straight.
Arthur Eddington
#52. 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.
Arthur Eddington
#53. Every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it doesn't.
Arthur Eddington
#54. In Einstein's theory of relativity the observer is a man who sets out in quest of truth armed with a measuring-rod. In quantum theory he sets out with a sieve.
Arthur Eddington
#55. Our ultimate analysis of space leads us not to a "here" and a "there," but to an extension such as that which relates "here" and "there." To put the conclusion rather crudely-space is not a lot of points close together; it is a lot of distances interlocked.
Arthur Eddington
#56. We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown.
Arthur Eddington
#57. 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
#58. The quest of the absolute leads into the four-dimensional world.
Arthur Eddington
#59. It is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they are confirmed by theory.
Arthur Eddington
#60. 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
#61. So far as physics is concerned, time's arrow is a property of entropy alone.
Arthur Eddington
#62. The helium which we handle must have been put together at some time and some place. We do not argue with the critic who urges that the stars are not hot enough for this process; we tell him to go and find a hotter place.
Arthur Eddington
#64. There once was a brainy baboon,
Who always breathed down a bassoon,
For he said, It appears
That in billions of years
I shall certainly hit on a tune.
Arthur Eddington
#66. Don't believe the results of experiments until they're confirmed by theory.
Arthur Eddington
#67. Events do not happen; they are just there, and we come across them.
Arthur Eddington
#68. Confidence is not about being self-centered. It's about being emotionally centered, so you can better see other people.
Karen C. Eddington
#69. Proof is an idol before which the mathematician tortures himself.
Arthur Eddington
#70. It is sound judgment to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star.
Arthur Eddington
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory.
Arthur Eddington
#74. The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.
Freeman Dyson
#75. A journalist once asked me what I would like my epitaph to be and I said I think I would like it to be 'He did very little harm'. And that's not easy. Most people seem to me to do a great deal of harm. If I could be remembered as having done very little, that would suit me.
Paul Eddington
#76. [When thinking about the new relativity and quantum theories] I have felt a homesickness for the paths of physical science where there are ore or less discernible handrails to keep us from the worst morasses of foolishness.
Arthur Eddington
#77. 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
#78. You cannot disturb the tiniest petal of a flower without the troubling of a distant star.
Arthur Eddington
#79. The more perfect the instrument as a measurer of time, the more completely does it conceal time's arrow.
Arthur Stanley Eddington
#80. I don't believe any experiment until it is confirmed by theory. I find this is a witty inversion of "conventional" wisdom.
Arthur Eddington
#81. In any attempt to bridge the domains of experience belonging to the spiritual and physical sides of nature, time occupies the key position.
Arthur Eddington
#82. 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
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