About Author : Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, was an English astrophysicist of the early 20th century. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars, or the radiation generated by accretion onto a compact object, is named in his honour.He is famous for his work regarding the Theory of Relativity. Eddington wrote a number of articles which announced and explained Einstein’s theory of general relativity to the English-speaking world. World War I severed many lines of scientific communication and new developments in German science were not well known in England. He also conducted an eclipse expedition in 1919 that provided one of the earliest confirmations of relativity, and became known for his popular expositions and interpretations of the theory.
Sir Arthur Eddington Quotes and Quotations
If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum.
It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.
I ask you to look both ways. For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.
Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.
Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.
We have found a strange footprint 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.
We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident bits of a star gone wrong.
We used to think that if we knew one we knew two because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about ‘and’.
Science is one thing wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool with which men play like children and cut their own fingers.
For the truth of the conclusions of physical science observation is the supreme Court of Appeal. It does not follow that every item which we confidently accept as physical knowledge has actually been certified by the Court our confidence is that it would be certified by the Court if it were submitted. But it does follow that every item of physical knowledge is of a form which might be submitted to the Court. It must be such that we can specify although it may be impracticable to carry out an observational procedure which would decide whether it is true or not. Clearly a statement cannot be tested by observation unless it is an assertion about the results of observation. Every item of physical knowledge must therefore be an assertion of what has been or would be the result of carrying out a specified observational procedure.
Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine it is stranger than we can imagine.
The mathematics is not there till we put it there.