Arthur Eddington quotes - page 2

It is sound judgment to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star. (Arthur Eddington)
Something unknown is doing we don't know what. View quote
Arthur Eddington
It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference - inference either intuitive or deliberate. View quote
Arthur Eddington
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. View quote
Arthur Eddington
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. View quote
Arthur Eddington
We are no longer tempted to condemn the spiritual aspects of our nature as illusory because of their lack of concreteness. View quote
Arthur Eddington
For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal. View quote
Arthur Eddington
I think it is not irreligion but a tidiness of mind, which rebels against the idea of permeating scientific research with a religious implication. View quote
Arthur Eddington
Whether in the intellectual pursuits of science or in the mystical pursuits of the spirit, the light beckons ahead, and the purpose surging in our nature responds. View quote
Arthur Eddington
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. View quote
Arthur Eddington
I think that science would never have achieved much progress if it had always imagined unknown obstacles hidden round every corner. At least we may peer gingerly round the corner, and perhaps we shall find there is nothing very formidable after all. (Arthur Eddington)
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. View quote
Arthur Eddington
Consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into sub-consciousness; and beyond that we must postulate something indefinite but yet continuous with our mental nature. This I take it be the world-stuff. View quote
Arthur Eddington
It is an astonishing feat of deciphering that we should have been able to infer an orderly scheme of natural knowledge from such indirect communication. View quote
Arthur Eddington
Wind, earthquake, fire-meteorology, seismology, physics-pass in review, as we have been reviewing the natural forces of evolution; the Lord was not in them. Afterwards, a stirring, an awakening in the organ of the brain, a voice which asks "What doest thou here?" View quote
Arthur Eddington
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... View quote
Arthur Eddington
The laws of logic do not prescribe the way our minds think; they prescribe the way our minds ought to think. View quote
Arthur Eddington
Even if religion and morality are dismissed as illusion, the word "Ought" still has sway. View quote
Arthur Eddington
As truly as the mystic, the scientist is following a light; and it is not a false or an inferior light. View quote
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. View quote
Arthur Eddington
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)
The mind-stuff is not spread in space and time. But we must presume that in some other way or aspect it can be differentiated into parts. Only here and there does it arise to the level of consciousness, but from such islands proceeds all knowledge. The latter includes our knowledge of the physical world. View quote
Arthur Eddington
A star is drawing on some vast reservoir of energy by means unknown to us. This reservoir can scarcely be other than the sub-atomic energy which, it is known, exists abundantly in all matter; we sometimes dream that man will one day learn to release it and use it for his service. The store is well-nigh inexhaustible, if only it could be tapped. View quote
Arthur Eddington
By his theory of relativity Albert Einstein has provoked a revolution of thought in physical science. ...Physical space and time are found to be closely bound... with... motion of the observer; and only an amorphous combination of the two is left... It is my aim to give an account of this work without introducing anything very technical in... mathematics, physics, or philosophy. ...[T]he task is one of interpreting a clear-cut theory... although perhaps not everyone would accept the author's views of its meaning. View quote
Arthur Eddington
Physics has in the main contented itself with studying the abridged edition of the book of nature. View quote
Arthur Eddington