Arthur Eddington - Space, time and gravitation (1920)

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Where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature.

Arthur Eddington
It is natural that our senses should have developed faculties for perceiving some of these intrinsic distinctions of the possible states of the world around us. I prefer to think of matter and energy, not as agents causing the degrees of curvature of the world, but as parts of our perceptions of the existence of the curvature.

Arthur Eddington
It is curious that the philosophical denial of absolute motion is readily accepted, whilst the denial of absolute simultaneity appears to many people revolutionary.

Arthur Eddington
Accidental truth of a conclusion is no compensation for erroneous deduction.

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
The velocity of light plays a conspicuous part in the relativity theory, and it is of importance to understand what is the property associated with it which makes it fundamental. The fact that the velocity of light is the same for all observers is a consequence rather than a cause of its pre-eminent character.

Arthur Eddington
The distinction between horizontal and vertical is not an illusion; and the man who thinks it is is likely to come to an untimely end. Yet we can not arrive at a comprehensive view of nature unless we combine horizontal and vertical dimensions into three dimensional space.

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
Unless science is to degenerate into idle guessing, the test of value of any theory must be whether it expresses with as little redundancy as possible the facts which it intended to cover.

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
Events do not happen; they are just there, and we come across them.

Arthur Eddington
There are two parties to every observation - the observed and the observer.

Arthur Eddington
I really cannot tell you anything about it, if you will not let me make measurements of any kind. Measurement is my only means of finding out about nature. I am not a metaphysicist.

Arthur Eddington
Let the observer place himself so that he is, to the best of his knowledge, at rest. If he is a normal human being, he will seat himself in an arm-chair; if he is an astronomer, he will place himself on the sun or at the centre of the stellar universe.

Arthur Eddington
It is well to be explicit when a positive generalization is made from negative experimental evidence.

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
[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
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
[Experimental Physicist] Phys. I cannot imagine myself perceiving non-Euclidean space!
Math. Look at the reflection of the room in a polished doorknob, and imagine yourself one of the actors in what you see going on there.

Arthur Eddington
We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own.

Arthur Eddington