Arthur Eddington - Scientific Quotes

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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
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 mind is not content to leave scientific Truth in a dry husk of mathematical symbols, and demands that it shall be alloyed with familiar images. The mathematician, who handles x so lightly, may fairly be asked to state, not indeed the inscrutable meaning of x in nature, but the meaning which x conveys to him.

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
We should be unwise to trust scientific inference very far when it becomes divorced from opportunity for observational test.

Arthur Eddington
To imagine that Newton's great scientific reputation is tossing up and down in these latter-day revolutions is to confuse science with omniscience.

Arthur Eddington
It is true that the whole scientific inquiry starts from the familiar world and in the end it must return to the familiar world; but the part of the journey over which the physicist has charge is in foreign territory.

Arthur Eddington
It is probably true that the recent changes of scientific thought remove some of the obstacles to a reconciliation of religion with science; but this must be carefully distinguished from any proposal to base religion on scientific discovery. For my own part I am wholly opposed to any such attempt.

Arthur Eddington
Between physics and philosophy there lies a debatable territory which I shall call scientific epistemology.

Arthur Eddington
With this brief glance at the scenery that we pass we shall plunge into the deep interior [of a star] - where the eye cannot penetrate, but where it is yet possible by scientific reasoning to learn a great deal about the conditions.

Arthur Eddington
The cleavage between the scientific and the extra-scientific domain of experience is, I believe, not a cleavage between the concrete and the transcendental, but between the metrical and non-metrical.

Arthur Eddington
It is quite commonly said that scientific theories about the world are neither true nor false but merely convenient or inconvenient.

Arthur Eddington
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
Amid all our faulty attempts at expression the kernal of scientific truth steadily grows; and of this truth it may be said — The more it changes, the more it remains the same.

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
Scientific theories have blundered no doubt in the past; they blunder no doubt today; yet we cannot doubt that along with the error there come gleams of a truth for which the human mind is impelled to strive.

Arthur Eddington
If God is as real as the shadow of the Great War on Armistice Day, need we seek further reason for making a place for God in our thoughts and lives? We shall not be concerned if the scientific explorer reports that he is perfectly satisfied that he has got to the bottom of things without having come across either.

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
We have to build the spiritual world out of symbols taken from our own personality, as we build the scientific world out of the symbols of the mathematician.

Arthur Eddington
Study of the scientific world cannot prescribe the orientation of something which is excluded from the scientific world.

Arthur Eddington
The scientific answer is relevant so far as concerns the sense-impressions... For the rest the human spirit must turn to the unseen world to which it itself belongs.

Arthur Eddington
I think it is not irreligion but a tidiness of mind, which rebels against the idea of permeating scientific research with a religious implication.

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
Consciousness is not wholly, nor even primarily a device for receiving sense-impressions.... there is another outlook than the scientific one, because in practice a more transcendental outlook is almost universally admitted.... who does not prize these moments that reveal to us the poetry of existence?

Arthur Eddington