Arthur Eddington Quotes

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[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
If in a community of the blind one man suddenly received the gift of sight, he would have much to tell which would not be at all scientific.

Arthur Eddington
Every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it doesn't.

Arthur Eddington
If today you ask a physicist what he has finally made out the æther or the electron to be, the answer will not be a description in terms of billiard balls or fly-wheels or anything concrete; he will point instead to a number of symbols and a set of mathematical equations which they satisfy. What do the symbols stand for? The mysterious reply is given that physics is indifferent to that; it has no means of probing beneath the symbolism. To understand the phenomena of the physical world it is necessary to know the equations which the symbols obey but not the nature of that which is being symbolised.... this newer outlook has modified the challenge from the material to the spiritual world.

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
If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel.

Arthur Eddington
We do not want a religion that deceives us for our own good.

Arthur Eddington
Even if religion and morality are dismissed as illusion, the word "Ought" still has sway.

Arthur Eddington
The electron, as it leaves the atom, crystallises out of Schrödinger's mist like a genie emerging from his bottle.

Arthur Eddington
Natural law is not applicable to the unseen world behind the symbols, because it is unadapted to anything except symbols, and its perfection is a perfection of symbolic linkage. You cannot apply such a scheme to the parts of our personality which are not measurable by symbols any more than you can extract the square root of a sonnet.

Arthur Eddington
Schrödinger's wave-mechanics is not a physical theory, but a dodge — and a very good dodge too.

Arthur Eddington