Arthur Eddington Quotes

212 Sourced Quotes

I am afraid the knockabout comedy of modern atomic physics is not very tender towards our aesthetic ideals. The stately drama of stellar evolution turns out to be more like the hair-breadth escapades in the films. The music of the spheres has a painful suggestion of — jazz.

Arthur Eddington
So far as broader characteristics are concerned we see in Nature what we look for or are equipped to look for.

Arthur Eddington
To the pure geometer the radius of curvature is an incidental characteristic — like the grin of the Cheshire cat. To the physicist it is an indispensable characteristic. It would be going too far to say that to the physicist the cat is merely incidental to the grin. Physics is concerned with interrelatedness such as the interrelatedness of cats and grins. In this case the "cat without a grin" and the "grin without a cat" are equally set aside as purely mathematical phantasies.

Arthur Eddington
The desire for truth so prominent in the quest of science, a reaching out of the spirit from its isolation to something beyond, a response to beauty in nature and art, an Inner Light of conviction and guidance—are these as much a part of our being as our sensitivity to sense impressions?

Arthur Eddington
I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way!

Arthur Eddington
The exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating.

Arthur Eddington
Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather that wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.

Arthur Eddington
The laws of logic do not prescribe the way our minds think; they prescribe the way our minds ought to think.

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

Arthur Eddington
There is another passage from the Old Testament that comes nearer to my own sympathies—"And behold the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.... And behold there came a voice unto him, and said. What doest thou here, Elijah?"

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
It [the physical world is a thing; not like space, which is a mere negation; nor like time, which is — Heaven knows what!

Arthur Eddington
[Relativist] Rel. There is a well-known proposition of Euclid which states that "Any two sides of a triangle are together greater than the third side." Can either of you tell me whether nowadays there is good reason to believe that this proposition is true?
[Pure Mathematician] Math. For my part, I am quite unable to say whether the proposition is true or not. I can deduce it by trustworthy reasoning from certain other propositions or axioms, which are supposed to be still more elementary. If these axioms are true, the proposition is true; if the axioms are not true, the proposition is not true universally. Whether the axioms are true or not I cannot say, and it is outside my province to consider.

Arthur Eddington
The running away of the galaxies does not mean that they have a kind of aversion from us.

Arthur Eddington
Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience.

Arthur Eddington
It is an astonishing feat of deciphering that we should have been able to infer an orderly scheme of natural knowledge from such indirect communication.

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

Arthur Eddington
The mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions.

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

Arthur Eddington
I shall mix together results which may prove to be of scientific importance and results that are probably no more than mathematical curiosities. The plan is to set down anything that seems worthy of note, even though we cannot see that it has any ultimate importance in nature.

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
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
One of our ancestors, taking arboreal exercise in the forest, failed to reach the bough intended and his hand closed on nothingness. The accident might well occasion philosophical reflections on the distinctions of substance and void - to say nothing of the phenomenon of gravity.

Arthur Eddington
An electron could never decide how large it ought to be unless there existed some length independent of itself for it to compare itself with.

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