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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… - Arthur Eddington
" "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.
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About Arthur Eddington
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
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Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington
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Sir Arthur Eddington
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Additional quotes by Arthur Eddington
Much of the apparent uniformity of Nature is a uniformity of averages. Our gross senses only take cognizance of the average effect of vast numbers of individual particles and processes; and the regularity of the average might well be compatible with a great degree of lawlessness of the individual. I do not think it is possible to dismiss statistical laws (such as the second law of thermodynamics) as merely mathematical adaptations of the other classes of law to certain practical problems.
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I think that the suspicion has been generally entertained that the stars are the crucibles in which the lighter atoms which abound in the nebulæ are compounded into more complex elements. In the stars matter has its preliminary brewing to prepare the greater variety of elements which are needed for a world of life. The radio-active elements must have been formed at no very distant date; and their synthesis, unlike the generation of helium from hydrogen, is endothermic.
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