Arthur Eddington - Law Quotes

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

Arthur Eddington
There is only one law of Nature-the second law of thermodynamics-which recognises a distinction between past and future more profound than the difference of plus and minus. It stands aloof from all the rest.... It opens up a new province of knowledge, namely, the study of organisation; and it is in connection with organisation that a direction of time-flow and a distinction between doing and undoing appears for the first time.

Arthur Eddington
We can see that, the constant in the law of gravitation being fixed, there may be some upper limit to the amount of matter possible; as more and more matter is added in the distant parts, space curves round and ultimately closes; the process of adding more matter must stop, because there is no more space, and we can only return to the region already dealt with. But there seems nothing to prevent a defect of matter, leaving space unclosed. Some mechanism seems to be needed, whereby either gravitation creates matter, or all the matter in the universe conspires to define a law of gravitation.

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
It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has no control. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them.

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

Arthur Eddington
Materialism in its literal sense is long since dead.... It is... belief in the universal dominance of scientific law which is nowadays generally meant by materialism.

Arthur Eddington
However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as soon as we consider the fundamental property of thought—that it may be correct or incorrect.... that involves recognising a domain of the other type of law—laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken.

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

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

Arthur Eddington
If there were no matter in the universe, the law of gravitation would fall to the ground.

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