Quotes About Eddington

It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has no control.

Schrödinger's wave-mechanics is not a physical theory, but a dodge - and a very good dodge too.

Yes, it is indeed by way of the mathematical forms that the physicist gains knowledge of the external world; Eddington's point, however, is that the forms in question have been artificially imposed: "The mathematics is not there until we put it there." And it is for this reason, and in this sense, that our knowledge of mathematical structures—our knowledge of the physical world!—is said to be subjective.

If your theory is found to be against the second law of theromodynamics, I give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

Sir Arthur Eddington summed up the situation brilliantly in his book The Nature of the Physical World, published in 1929. "No familiar conceptions can be woven around the electron," he said, and our best description of the atom boils down to "something unknown is doing we don't know what".

For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal.

Just as we were misled into untenable ideas of the aether through trusting to an analogy with the material ocean, so we have been misled into untenable ideas of the attributes of the microscopic elements of world-structure through trusting to analogy with gross particles.

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 the non-metrical.

Of the two alternatives - a curved manifold in a Euclidean space of ten dimensions or a manifold with non-Euclidean geometry and no extra dimensions - which is right? I would rather not attempt a direct answer, because I fear I should get lost in a fog of metaphysics. But I may say at once that I do not take the ten dimensions seriously; whereas I take the non-Euclidean geometry of the world very seriously, and I do not regard it as a thing which needs explaining away.

In any attempt to bridge the domains of experience belonging to the spiritual and physical sides of nature, time occupies the key position.

For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal.