Arthur Eddington Quotes

212 Sourced Quotes

I am an Evolutionist, not a Multiplicationist. It seems rather stupid to keep doing the same thing over and over again.

Arthur Eddington
Wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together, and where the symbols of the mathematical physicists flock, there presumably is some prey for them to settle on, which the plain man at least will prefer to call by a name suggestive of something more than passive emptiness.

Arthur Eddington
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
The symbol A is not the counterpart of anything in familiar life. To the child the letter A would seem horribly abstract; so we give him a familiar conception along with it.

Arthur Eddington
Where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature.

Arthur Eddington
We have not to discover the properties of a thing which we have recognized in nature, but to discover how to recognize in nature a thing whose properties we have assigned.

Arthur Eddington
Nowadays whenever enthusiasts meet together to discuss theoretical physics the talk sooner or later turns in a certain direction. You leave them conversing on their special problems or the latest discoveries; but return after an hour and it is any odds that they will have reached an allengrossing topic - the desperate state of their ignorance.

Arthur Eddington
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
An addition to knowledge is won at the expense of an addition to ignorance. It is hard to empty the well of Truth with a leaky bucket.

Arthur Eddington
It is the inexorable law of our acquaintance with the external world that that which is presented for knowing becomes transformed in the process of knowing.

Arthur Eddington
Philosophically the notion of a beginning of Nature is repugnant to me.

Arthur Eddington
I have not suggested that religion and free will can be deduced from modern physics...

Arthur Eddington
There was once 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
We need scarcely add that the contemplation in natural science of a wider domain than the actual leads to a far better understanding of the actual.

Arthur Eddington
We should be unwise to trust scientific inference very far when it becomes divorced from opportunity for observational test.

Arthur Eddington
All change is relative. The universe is expanding relatively to our common material standards; our material standards are shrinking relatively to the size of the universe. The theory of the "expanding universe" might also be called the theory of the "shrinking atom".

Arthur Eddington
The future is not predetermined, and Nature has no need to protect herself from giving away plans which she has not yet made.

Arthur Eddington
Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.

Arthur Eddington
The recent tendencies of science do... take us to an eminence from which we can look down into the deep waters of philosophy; and if I rashly plunge into them, it is not because I have confidence in my powers of swimming, but to try to show that the water is really deep.

Arthur Eddington
I admit I am hazy about strict definitions. There is not time for everything; and there are so many interesting things to find out in physics, which take up my attention.

Arthur Eddington
Distance and duration are the most fundamental terms in physics; velocity, acceleration, force, energy, and so on, all depend on them; and we can scarcely make any statement in physics without direct or indirect reference to them.

Arthur Eddington
It is by looking into our own nature that we first discover the failure of the physical universe to be co-extensive with our experience of reality. The "something to which truth matters" must surely have a place in reality what ever definition of reality we may adopt.

Arthur Eddington
Rather against my better judgment I will try to give a rough impression of the theory. 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 Eddington
An electron would not know how large it ought to be unless there existed independent lengths in space for it to measure itself against.

Arthur Eddington
There can be no unique probability attached to any event or behavior: we can only speak of "probability in the light of certain given information", and the probability alters according to the extent of the information.

Arthur Eddington
Unless science is to degenerate into idle guessing, the test of value of any theory must be whether it expresses with as little redundancy as possible the facts which it intended to cover.

Arthur Eddington
It is obvious that the moon and the mathematician use different methods of finding the lunar orbit.

Arthur Eddington
In science as in religion the truth shines ahead as a beacon showing us the path; we do not ask to attain it; it is better far that we be permitted to seek.

Arthur Eddington
However successful the theory of a four-dimensional world may be, it is difficult to ignore a voice inside us which whispers "At the back of your mind, you know that a fourth dimension is all nonsense." I fancy that that voice must often have had a busy time in the past history of physics.... Let us not be beguiled by this voice. It is discredited.

Arthur Eddington
A spherical world, closed but continually expanding, is a new playground for thought.

Arthur Eddington