Arthur Eddington - Time Quotes

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The great thing about time is that it goes on.

Arthur Eddington
The time has gone by when the physicists prescribed dictatorially what theories the geologist might be permitted to consider.

Arthur Eddington
We can now form some sort of picture of the inside of a star — a hurly burly of atoms, electrons and aether-waves. Disheveled atoms tear along at a hundred miles a second, their normal array of electrons being torn from them in the scrimmage. The lost electrons are speeding a hundred times faster to find new resting places.

Arthur Eddington
However successful the theory of a four-dimensional world may be, it is difficult to ignore a voice inside us which whispers "At the back of your mind, you know that a fourth dimension is all nonsense." I fancy that that voice must often have had a busy time in the past history of physics.... Let us not be beguiled by this voice. It is discredited.

Arthur Eddington
I admit I am hazy about strict definitions. There is not time for everything; and there are so many interesting things to find out in physics, which take up my attention.

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

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
Our model of Nature... should be like an engine with movable parts. We need not fix the position of any one lever; that is to be adjusted from time to time as the latest observations indicate. The aim of the theorist is to know the train of wheels which the lever sets in motion — that binding of the parts which is the soul of the engine.

Arthur Eddington
The helium which we handle must have been put together at some time and some place. We do not argue with the critic who urges that the stars are not hot enough for this process; we tell him to go and find a hotter place.

Arthur Eddington
The material structure of the four-dimensional world is fibrous, with the threads all running along time — like tracks; it is a tangled warp without a woof.

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
Never mind what two tons refers to. What is it? How has it entered in so definite a way into our exprerience? Two tons is the reading of the pointer when the elephant was placed on a weighing machine. Let us pass on. … And so we see that the poetry fades out of the problem, and by the time the serious application of exact science begins we are left only with pointer readings.

Arthur Eddington
We have travelled far from the standpoint which identifies the real with the concrete. Even the older philosophy found it necessary to admit exceptions; for example, time must be admitted to be real, although no one could attribute to it a concrete nature.

Arthur Eddington
Let us draw an arrow arbitrarily. If as we follow the arrow we find more and more of the random element in the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future; if the random element decreases the arrow points towards the past…I shall use the phrase 'time's arrow' to express this one-way property of time which has no analogue in space.

Arthur Eddington
So far as physics is concerned, time's arrow is a property of entropy alone.

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
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