Arthur Eddington - Physical Quotes

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The idealistic tinge in my conception of the physical world arose out of mathematical researches on the relativity theory. In so far as I had any earlier philosophical views, they were of an entirely different complexion.
From the beginning I have been doubtful whether it was desirable for a scientist to venture so far into extra-scientific territory. The primary justification for such an expedition is that it may afford a better view of his own scientific domain.

Arthur Eddington
In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it.... The frank realization that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.

Arthur Eddington
If today you ask a physicist what he has finally made out the aether 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
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
Schrödinger's wave-mechanics is not a physical theory, but a dodge — and a very good dodge too.

Arthur Eddington
The mind-stuff is not spread in space and time. But we must presume that in some other way or aspect it can be differentiated into parts. Only here and there does it arise to the level of consciousness, but from such islands proceeds all knowledge. The latter includes our knowledge of the physical world.

Arthur Eddington
Matter and all else that is in the physical world have been reduced to a shadowy symbolism.

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
That which in the physical world shadows the nonsense in the mind affords no ground for its condemnation. In a world of aether and electrons we might perhaps encounter nonsense; we could not encounter damned nonsense.

Arthur Eddington
For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal.

Arthur Eddington
We have swept away the anti-chance from the field of our current physical problems, but we have not got rid of it. When some of us are so misguided as to try to get back milliards of years into the past we find the sweepings piled up high like a high wall, forming a boundary — a beginning of time — which we cannot climb over.

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
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
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
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