Arthur Eddington Quotes

212 Sourced Quotes

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
If we are to discern controlling laws of Nature not dictated by the mind it would seem necessary to escape as far as possible from the cut-and-dried framework into which the mind is so ready to force everything that it experiences.

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

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
Shuffling is the only thing which Nature cannot undo.

Arthur Eddington
We should not argue with the blind man who maintained that sight was an illusion to which some abnormal people were subject. Therefore in speaking of religious experience I do not attempt to prove the existence of religious experience...

Arthur Eddington
We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own.

Arthur Eddington
The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. 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.

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
Dismiss the idea that natural law may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table singlehanded.

Arthur Eddington
Nature made nearly every possible mistake before she reached her greatest achievement, Man — or perhaps some would say her worst mistake of all.

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
Our environment may and should mean something towards us which is not to be measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician.

Arthur Eddington
[Experimental Physicist] Phys. I cannot imagine myself perceiving non-Euclidean space!
Math. Look at the reflection of the room in a polished doorknob, and imagine yourself one of the actors in what you see going on there.

Arthur Eddington
The problem of experiences is not limited to the interpretation of sense-impressions.

Arthur Eddington
It is curious that the philosophical denial of absolute motion is readily accepted, whilst the denial of absolute simultaneity appears to many people revolutionary.

Arthur Eddington
But it is necessary to insist more strongly than usual that what I am putting before you is a model—the Bohr model atom—because later I shall take you to a profounder level of representation in which the electron instead of being confined to a particular locality is distributed in a sort of probability haze all over the atom.

Arthur Eddington
To those who have any intimate acquaintance with the laws of chemistry and physics the suggestion that the spiritual world could be ruled by laws of allied character is as preposterous as the suggestion that a nation could be ruled by laws like the laws of grammar.

Arthur Eddington
The super-system of the galaxies is dispersing as a puff of smoke disperses. Sometimes I wonder whether there may not be a greater scale of existence of things, in which it is no more than a puff of smoke.

Arthur Eddington
A star is drawing on some vast reservoir of energy by means unknown to us. This reservoir can scarcely be other than the subatomic energy which, it is known exists abundantly in all matter; we sometimes dream that man will one day learn how to release it and use it for his service. The store is well nigh inexhaustible, if only it could be tapped. There is sufficient in the Sun to maintain its output of heat for 15 billion years.

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
The distinction between horizontal and vertical is not an illusion; and the man who thinks it is is likely to come to an untimely end. Yet we can not arrive at a comprehensive view of nature unless we combine horizontal and vertical dimensions into three dimensional space.

Arthur Eddington
Results of measurements are the subject-matter of physics; and the moral of the theory of relativity is that we can only comprehend what the physical quantities stand for if we first comprehend what they are.

Arthur Eddington