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Arthur Eddington

104 quotes

“It remains a real world if there is a background to the symbols — an unknown quantity which the mathematical symbol x stands for. We think we are not wholly cut off from this background. It is to this background that our own personality and consciousness belong, and those spiritual aspects of our nature not to be described by any symbolism … to which mathematical physics has hitherto restricted itself.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our story of evolution ended with a stirring in the brain-organ of the latest of Nature's experiments; but that stirring of consciousness transmutes the whole story and gives meaning to its symbolism. Symbolically it is the end, but looking behind the symbolism it is the beginning.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The problem of experiences is not limited to the interpretation of sense-impressions.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As truly as the mystic, the scientist is following a light; and it is not a false or an inferior light.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The desire for truth so prominent in the quest of science, a reaching out of the spirit from its isolation to something beyond, a response to beauty in nature and art, an Inner Light of conviction and guidance — are these as much a part of our being as our sensitivity to sense impressions?”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Study of the scientific world cannot prescribe the orientation of something which is excluded from the scientific world.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our system of philosophy is itself on trial; it must stand or fall according as it is broad enough to find room for this experience as an element of life.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our environment may and should mean something towards us which is not to be measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Objections to religious mysticism lose their force if they can equally be turned against natural mysticism.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We should not argue with the blind man who maintained that sight was an illusion to which some abnormal people were subject. Therefore in speaking of religious experience I do not attempt to prove the existence of religious experience …”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What I may attempt is to dispel the feeling that in using the eye of the body or the eye of the soul, and incorporating what is thereby revealed in our conception of reality, we are doing something irrational and disobeying the leading of truth which as scientists we are pledged to serve.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The essential difference, which we meet in entering the realm of spirit and mind, seems to hang round the word "Ought.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even if religion and morality are dismissed as illusion, the word "Ought" still has sway.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The laws of logic do not prescribe the way our minds think; they prescribe the way our minds ought to think.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We do not want a religion that deceives us for our own good.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ninety-nine people out of a hundred have not seriously considered what they mean by the term "exist" nor how a thing qualifies itself to be labelled real.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Theological or anti-theological argument to prove or disprove the existence of a deity seems to me to occupy itself largely with skating among the difficulties caused by our making a fetish of this word [existence].”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science has an important part to play in our everyday existence, and there is far too much neglect of science; but its intention is to supplement not to supplant the familiar outlook.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the kind of controversy which so often springs up between modernism and traditionalism in religion were applied to more commonplace affairs of life we might see some strange results. … It arises, let us say, from a passage in an obituary notice which mentions that the deceased had loved to watch the sunsets from his peaceful country home.. … it is forgotten that what the deceased man looked out for each evening was an experience and not a creed.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is perhaps difficult sufficiently to emphasise Seeking without disparaging its correlative Finding. But I must risk this, for Finding has a clamorous voice that proclaims its own importance; it is definite and assured, something that we can take hold of — that is what we all want, or think we want. Yet how transitory it proves. The finding of one generation will not serve for the next. It tarnishes rapidly except it be reserved with an ever-renewed spirit of seeking.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You will understand the true spirit neither of science nor of religion unless seeking is placed in the forefront.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If our so-called facts are changing shadows, they are shadows cast by the light of constant truth. So too in religion we are repelled by that confident theological doctrine … but we need not turn aside from the measure of light that comes into our experience showing us a Way through the unseen world.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The mathematics is not there till we put it there.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The present revolution of scientific thought follows in natural sequence on the great revolutions at earlier epochs in the history of science. Einstein's special theory of relativity, which explains the indeterminateness of the frame of space and time, crowns the work of Copernicus who first led us to give up our insistence on a geocentric outlook on nature; Einstein's general theory of relativity, which reveals the curvature or non-Euclidean geometry of space and time, carries forward the rudimentary thought of those earlier astronomers who first contemplated the possibility that their existence lay on something which was not flat. These earlier revolutions are still a source of perplexity in childhood, which we soon outgrow; and a time will come when Einstein's amazing revelations have likewise sunk into the commonplaces of educated thought.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Theory of Relativity and its Influence on Scientific Thought (24 May 1922), p. 31-32
“On the observational side we have fairly satisfactory knowledge of the masses and densities of the stars and of the total radiation emitted by them; this knowledge is partly individual and partly statistical. The theoretical analysis connects these observational data... with the physical properties of the material inside the star... We can thus find certain information as to the inner material, as though we had actually bored a hole. ...[W]e depend entirely on the well-tried principle of conservation of momentum and the second law of thermodynamics. If any element of speculation remains ...it is no more than is inseparable from every kind of theoretical advance.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our observational knowledge of the things here discussed is chiefly of a rather vague kind, and we can scarcely claim more than a general agreement of theory and observation. What we have been able to do in the way of tests is to offer the theory a considerable number of opportunities to "make a fool of itself," and so far it has not fallen into our traps. When the theory tells us that a star having the mass of the sun will at one stage in its career reach a maximum effective temperature of 9000° (the sun's effective temperature [of the ] being 6000°) we cannot do much in the way of checking it; but an erroneous theory might well have said that the maximum temperature was 20,000° (hotter than any known star), in which case we should have detected its error. If we cannot feel confident that the answers of the theory are true, it must be admitted that it has shown some discretion in lying without being found out.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Probably the greatest need of stellar astronomy... in order to make sure that our theoretical deductions are starting on the right lines, is some means of measuring the apparent angular diameters of stars. At present we can calculate them approximately from theory, but there is no observational check. ...If the direct measurement ...could be made with any accuracy it would make a wonderfully rapid advance in our knowledge. The prospects... are now... hopeful. ...[W]ork is being carried out by interferometer methods with the 100-in. reflector at Mt. Wilson, and the results are promising. At present the method has been applied only to measuring the separation of close s... Although the great mirror is used for convenience, the interferometer method does not in principle require great apertures, but rather two small apertures widely separated, as in a range-finder.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is the source of heat which the sun and the stars are continually squandering? The answer given is almost unanimous... the gravitational energy converted as the star steadily contracts. ...Lord Kelvin showed that this hypothesis, due to Helmholtz, necessarily dates the birth of the sun about 20,000,000 years ago; and he made strenuous efforts to induce geologists and biologists to accommodate... But... outrageous violations of this limit have prevailed. ...Sir 's theory of the earth-moon system, to the present Lord Raleigh's ...age of terrestrial rocks from occluded helium, and to all modern discussions of the statistical equilibrium of the stellar system. No one seems to have any hesitation... in carrying back the history of the earth long before the supposed date of formation of the solar system... in some cases... this appears... justified by experimental evidence... difficult to dispute. Lord Kelvin's date of the creation of the sun is treated with no more respect than Archbishop Ussher's.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[P]erhaps there is something to be said for . The classic authorities tell us that he was only "doing a stunt," but I... think of him as a man who... brought to light a constructional defect in the flying-machines of his day. So too, in science, cautious Dædalus will apply his theories where he feels most confident... but by... excess caution their hidden weaknesses cannot be brought to light. Icarus will strain his theories to the breaking-point until the weak joints gape. ...But if he is not yet destined to reach the sun and solve for all time the riddle of its constitution, yet he may hope to learn from his journey some hints to build a better machine.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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 (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Phys. I know that it is often a help to represent pressure and volume as height and width on paper; and so geometry may have applications to the theory of gases. But is it not going rather far to say that geometry can deal directly with these things and is not necessarily concerned with lengths in space? Math. No. Geometry is nowadays largely analytical, so that in form as well as in effect, it deals with variables of an unknown nature. … It is literally true that I do not want to know the significance of the variables x, y, z, t that I am discussing. … Phys. Yours is a strange subject. You told us at the beginning that you are not concerned as to whether your propositions are true, and now you tell us you do not even care to know what you are talking about. Math. That is an excellent description of Pure Mathematics, which has already been given by an eminent mathematician [Bertrand Russell].”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the reciprocity of these appearances — that each party should think the other has contracted — that is so difficult to realise. Here is a paradox beyond even the imagination of Dean Swift. Gulliver regarded the Lilliputians as a race of dwarfs; and the Lilliputians regarded Gulliver as a giant. That is natural. If the Lilliputians had appeared dwarfs to Gulliver, and Gulliver had appeared a dwarf to the Lilliputians — but no! that is too absurd for fiction, and is an idea only to be found in the sober pages of science. … It is not only in space but in time that these strange variations occur. If we observed the aviator carefully we should infer that he was unusually slow in his movements; and events in the conveyance moving with him would be similarly retarded — as though time had forgotten to go on. His cigar lasts twice as long as one of ours. … But here again reciprocity comes in, because in the aviator's opinion it is we who are travelling at 161,000 miles a second past him; and when he has made all allowances, he finds that it is we who are sluggish. Our cigar lasts twice as long as his.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is of interest to inquire what happens when the aviator's speed … approximates to the velocity of light. Lengths in the direction of flight become smaller and smaller, until for the speed of light they shrink to zero. The aviator and the objects accompanying him shrink to two dimensions. We are saved the difficulty of imagining how the processes of life can go on in two dimensions, because nothing goes on. Time is arrested altogether. This is the description according to the terrestrial observer. The aviator himself detects nothing unusual; he does not perceive that he has stopped moving. He is merely waiting for the next instant to come before making the next movement; and the mere fact that time is arrested means that he does not perceive that the next instant is a long time coming.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Spherical space is not very easy to imagine. We have to think of the properties of the surface of a sphere — the two-dimensional case — and try to conceive something similar applied to three-dimensional space. Stationing ourselves at a point let us draw a series of spheres of successively greater radii. The surface of a sphere of radius r should be proportional to r2; but in spherical space the areas of the more distant spheres begin to fall below the proper proportion. There is not so much room out there as we expected to find. Ultimately we reach a sphere of biggest possible area, and beyond it the areas begin to decrease. The last sphere of all shrinks to a point — our antipodes. Is there nothing beyond this? Is there a kind of boundary there? There is nothing beyond and yet there is no boundary. On the earth's surface there is nothing beyond our own antipodes but there is no boundary there.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience. It is not at all necessary that every individual symbol that is used should represent something in common experience or even something explicable in terms of common experience. The man in the street is always making this demand for concrete explanation of the things referred to in science; but of necessity he must be disappointed. It is like our experience in learning to read. That which is written in a book is symbolic of a story in real life. The whole intention of the book is that ultimately a reader will identify some symbol, say BREAD, with one of the conceptions of familiar life. But it is mischievous to attempt such identifications prematurely, before the letters are strung into words and the words into sentences. The symbol A is not the counterpart of anything in familiar life.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In physics we have outgrown archer and apple-pie definitions of the fundamental symbols. To a request to explain what an electron really is supposed to be we can only answer, "It is part of the A B C of physics". The external world of physics has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions. Later perhaps we may inquire whether in our zeal to cut out all that is unreal we may not have used the knife too ruthlessly. Perhaps, indeed, reality is a child which cannot survive without its nurse illusion. But if so, that is of little concern to the scientist, who has good and sufficient reasons for pursuing his investigations in the world of shadows and is content to leave to the philosopher the determination of its exact status in regard to reality. 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. Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. The sparsely spread nuclei of electric force become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow. Nor does the alchemy stop here. In the transmuted world new significances arise which are scarcely to be traced in the world of symbols; so that it becomes a world of beauty and purpose — and, alas, suffering and evil. The frank realisation that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind … To put the conclusion crudely — the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by "mind" I do not exactly mean mind and by "stuff" I do not at all mean stuff. Still that is about as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase. The mind-stuff of the world is something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to feelings in our consciousness … Having granted this, the mental activity of the part of world constituting ourselves occasions no great surprise; it is known to us by direct self-knowledge, and we do not explain it away as something other than we know it to be — or rather, it knows itself to be.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If to-day you ask a physicist what he has finally made out the æther 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 (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Physical science comes nearest to that complete system of exact knowledge which all sciences have before them as an ideal. Some fall far short of it. The physicist who inveighs against the lack of coherence and the indefiniteness of theological theories, will probably speak not much less harshly of the theories of biology and psychology. They also fail to come up to his standard of methodology. On the other side of him stands an even superior being — the pure mathematician — who has no high opinion of the methods of deduction used in physics, and does not hide his disapproval of the laxity of what is accepted as proof in physical science. And yet somehow knowledge grows in all these branches. Wherever a way opens we are impelled to seek by the only methods that can be devised for that particular opening, not over-rating the security of our finding, but conscious that in this activity of mind we are obeying the light that is in our nature.”
Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source