Arthur Eddington Quotes

British astrophysicist (1882-1944)

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington OM FRS (28 December 1882 – 22 November 1944) was an English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician. He was also a philosopher of science and a populariser of science. 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.

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Native Name: sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

Alternative Names: Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington • Sir Arthur Eddington

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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.

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].

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.

We do not want a religion that deceives us for our own good.

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.

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.

The mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions.

The laws of logic do not prescribe the way our minds think; they prescribe the way our minds ought to think.

Even if religion and morality are dismissed as illusion, the word "Ought" still has sway.

The essential difference, which we meet in entering the realm of spirit and mind, seems to hang round the word "Ought."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 …