Arthur Eddington Quotes

212 Sourced Quotes

If God is as real as the shadow of the Great War on Armistice Day, need we seek further reason for making a place for God in our thoughts and lives? We shall not be concerned if the scientific explorer reports that he is perfectly satisfied that he has got to the bottom of things without having come across either.

Arthur Eddington
You will understand the true spirit neither of science nor of religion unless seeking is placed in the forefront.

Arthur Eddington
Motion with respect to the universal ocean of aether eludes us. We say, "Let V be the velocity of a body through the aether", and form the various electromagnetic equations in which V is scattered liberally. Then we insert the observed values, and try to eliminate everything which is unknown except V. The solution goes on famously; but just as we have got rid of all the other unknowns, behold! V disappears as well, and we are left with the indisputable but irritating conclusion —

Arthur Eddington
Our story of evolution ended with a stirring in the brain-organ of the latest of Nature's experiments; but that stirring of consciousness transmutes the whole story and gives meaning to its symbolism. Symbolically it is the end, but looking behind the symbolism it is the beginning.

Arthur Eddington
There are no purely observational facts about the heavenly bodies. Astronomical measurements are, without exception, measurements of phenomena occurring in a terrestrial observatory or station; it is only by theory that they are translated into knowledge of a universe outside.

Arthur Eddington
Scientific theories have blundered no doubt in the past; they blunder no doubt today; yet we cannot doubt that along with the error there come gleams of a truth for which the human mind is impelled to strive.

Arthur Eddington
Something unknown is doing we don't know what.

Arthur Eddington
From the point of view of philosophy of science the conception associated with entropy must I think be ranked as the greatest contribution of the nineteenth century to scientific thought.

Arthur Eddington
Whatever may be time de jure, the Astronomer Royal's time is time de facto. His time permeates every corner of physics.

Arthur Eddington
Amid all our faulty attempts at expression the kernal of scientific truth steadily grows; and of this truth it may be said — The more it changes, the more it remains the same.

Arthur Eddington
A scientific writer is placed in a difficulty by his earlier books; either his new book will appear as a rather disjointed addendum to them, or he must perfunctorily go over again a great deal of matter which he has no wish to rewrite.

Arthur Eddington
The material structure of the four-dimensional world is fibrous, with the threads all running along time — like tracks; it is a tangled warp without a woof.

Arthur Eddington
It is quite commonly said that scientific theories about the world are neither true nor false but merely convenient or inconvenient.

Arthur Eddington
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 non-metrical.

Arthur Eddington
In science and in most philosophies spoken and printed words are treated, not only as immediate sensory data of our own consciousness, but as communicating to us data existing in other consciousnesses.

Arthur Eddington
The destinies of organic life may be determined by what are at first sight irrelevant accidents.

Arthur Eddington
With this brief glance at the scenery that we pass we shall plunge into the deep interior [of a star] - where the eye cannot penetrate, but where it is yet possible by scientific reasoning to learn a great deal about the conditions.

Arthur Eddington
We have discovered that it is actually an aid in the search for knowledge to understand the nature of the knowledge we seek.

Arthur Eddington
It is well to be explicit when a positive generalization is made from negative experimental evidence.

Arthur Eddington
Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself. In physics we are generally content to sacrifice before the lesser shrine of plausibility.

Arthur Eddington
In the end what we comprehend about the universe is precisely that which we put into the universe to make it comprehensible.

Arthur Eddington
That which in the physical world shadows the nonsense in the mind affords no ground for its condemnation. In a world of aether and electrons we might perhaps encounter nonsense; we could not encounter damned nonsense.

Arthur Eddington
For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal.

Arthur Eddington
The mind is irresistibly drawn to play with the thought that somewhere in the universe there may be other beings - a little lower than the angels" whom Man may regard as his equals - or perhaps his superiors.

Arthur Eddington
I think it incredible that the wider scheme of Nature which includes life and consciousness can be completely predetermined; yet I have not been able to form a satisfactory conception of any kind of law or causal sequence which shall be other than deterministic.

Arthur Eddington
Between physics and philosophy there lies a debatable territory which I shall call scientific epistemology.

Arthur Eddington
Let the observer place himself so that he is, to the best of his knowledge, at rest. If he is a normal human being, he will seat himself in an arm-chair; if he is an astronomer, he will place himself on the sun or at the centre of the stellar universe.

Arthur Eddington
In most modern theories of physics probability seems to have replaced aether as "the nominative of the verb 'to undulate'."

Arthur Eddington
He is an incorruptible watch-dog who will not allow anything to pass which is not observationally true.

Arthur Eddington
Our method of making an atom work is to knock it about; and if it does not do what we want, knock it still harder.

Arthur Eddington