Eddington Quotes

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.

An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water.

We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.

Asked in 1919 whether it was true that only three people in the world understood the theory of general relativity, [Eddington] allegedly replied: 'Who's the third?

Something unknown is doing we don't know what.

The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.

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".

We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because 'two' is 'one and one'. We forget that we have still to make a study of 'and'.

The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness.

Time goes forward because energy itself is always moving from an available to an unavailable state. Our consciousness is continually recording the entropy change in the world around us. We watch our friends get old and die. We sit next to a fire and watch it's red-hot embers turn slowly into cold white ashes. We experience the world always changing around us, and that experience is the unfolding of the second law. It is the irreversible process of dissipation of energy in the world. What does it mean to say, 'The world is running out of time'? Simply this: we experience the passage of time by the succession of one event after another. And every time an event occurs anywhere in this world energy is expended and the overall entropy is increased. To say the world is running out of time then, to say the world is running out of usable energy. In the words of Sir Arthur Eddington, 'Entropy is time's arrow'.

British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington’s memorable explanation of how the universe works: “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.

We are all of us clocks whose faces tell the passing years.

I believe that there are 15,747,724,136,275,02,577,605,653,961,181,555,468,044,717,914,527,116,709,366,231,425,076,185,631,031,296 protons in the universe and the same number of electrons.

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it to collapse in deepest humiliation.

Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.

The more perfect the instrument as a measurer of time, the more completely does it conceal time's arrow.

A few years after I gave some lectures for the freshmen at Caltech (which were published as the Feynman Lectures on Physics), I received a long letter from a feminist group. I was accused of being anti-women because of two stories: the first was a discussion of the subtleties of velocity, and involved a woman driver being stopped by a cop. There's a discussion about how fast she was going, and I had her raise valid objections to the cop's definitions of velocity. The letter said I was making the women look stupid. The other story they objected to was told by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington, who had just figured out that the stars get their power from burning hydrogen in a nuclear reaction producing helium. He recounted how, on the night after his discovery, he was sitting on a bench with his girlfriend. She said, "Look how pretty the stars shine!" To which he replied, "Yes, and right now, I'm the only man in the world who knows how they shine." He was describing a kind of wonderful loneliness you have when you make a discovery. The letter claimed that I was saying a women is incapable of understanding nuclear reactions. I figured there was no point in trying to answer their accusations in detail, so I wrote a short letter back to them: "Don't bug me, Man!

It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine - it is stranger than we can imagine.

A third reason scientists are reluctant to examine paranormal phenomena is that they appear to contradict known physical laws. What is the point of studying the impossible? Only a fool would waste his time. The problem of data in conflict with existing theory cannot be overstated. Arthur Eddington once said you should never believe any experiment until it has been confirmed by theory, but this humorous view has a reality that cannot be discounted.

The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds.... 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.

to some accounts, a journalist told Eddington in the early 1920s that he had heard there were only three people in the world who understood general relativity. Eddington paused, then replied, “I am trying to think who the third person is.”)

(According to some accounts, a journalist told Eddington in the early 1920s that he had heard there were only three people in the world who understood general relativity. Eddington paused, then replied, “I am trying to think who the third person is.”)

You will understand the true spirit neither of science nor of religion unless seeking is placed in the forefront.

Better admit that there was some truth both in science and religion; and if they must fight, let it be elsewhere than in the brain of a hard-working scientist.

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.

Never trust an experimental result until it has been confirmed by theory

We have learnt that 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. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness - the one centre where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations than those conditioned by the world of symbols... Physics most strongly insists that its methods do not penetrate behind the symbolism. Surely then that mental and spiritual nature of ourselves, known in our minds by an intimate contact transcending the methods of physics, supplies just that... which science is admittedly unable to give.

When we analyse the picture into a large number of particles of paint, we lose the aesthetic significance of the picture. The particles of paint go into the scientific inventory, and it is claimed that everything that there really was in the picture is kept. But this way of keeping a thing may be much the same as losing it. The essence of a picture (as distinct from the paint) is arrangement.

The skeptical Silberstein came up to Eddington and said that people believed that only three scientists in the world understood general relativity. He had been told that Eddington was one of them. The shy Quaker said nothing. “Don’t be so modest, Eddington!” said Silberstein. Replied Eddington, “On the contrary. I’m just wondering who the third might be.”30

Confidence is not about being self-centered. It's about being emotionally centered, so you can better see other people.

An individual is a four-dimensional objectof greatly elongated form; in ordinary language we say he has considerable extension in time and insignificant extension in space.

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 it is our own.” The quote was from Eddington’s Space, Time, and Gravitation, first published in 1920.

What should you do when you find you have made a mistake like that? Some people never admit that they are wrong and continue to find new, and often mutually inconsistent, arguments to support their case—as Eddington did in opposing black hole theory. Others claim to have never really supported the incorrect view in the first place or, if they did, it was only to show that it was inconsistent. It seems to me much better and less confusing if you admit in print that you were wrong. A good example of this was Einstein, who called the cosmological constant, which he introduced when he was trying to make a static model of the universe, the biggest mistake of his life.

The simpler elements of the scientific world have no immediate counterparts in everyday experience; we use them to build things which have counterparts.

Consciousness is not wholly, nor even primarily a device for receiving sense-impressions.

Sir Arthur Eddington as he contemplated the peculiarities of the quantum domain: “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.

whether I would agree with his theory that Professor Eddington’s relative silence at such convocations suggested a mastery of the open-eyed nap.

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 high school] my interests outside my academic work were debating, tennis, and to a lesser extent, acting. I became intensely interested in astronomy and devoured the popular works of astronomers such as Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, from which I learnt that a knowledge of mathematics and physics was essential to the pursuit of astronomy. This increased my fondness for those subjects.

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.

The actuality of Nature is like the beauty of Nature. We can scarcely describe the beauty of a landscape as non-existent when there is no conscious being to witness it; but it is through consciousness that we can attribute a meaning to it. And so it is with the actuality of the world. If actuality means 'known to mind' then it is a purely subjective character of the world; to make it objective we must substitute 'knowable to mind'.

We know the prodigality of Nature. How many acorns are scattered for one that grows to an oak? And need she be more careful of her stars than of her acorns? If indeed she has no grander aim than to provide a home for her greatest experiment, Man, it would be just like her methods to scatter a million stars whereof one might haply achieve her purpose.

Each of us is armed with this touchstone of actuality; by applying it we decide that this sorry world of ours is actual and Utopia is a dream. As our individual consciousnesses are different, so our touchstones are different; but fortunately they all agree in their indication of actuality - or at any rate those which agree are in sufficient majority to shut the others up in lunatic asylums.

The determinism of the physical laws simply reflects the determinism of the method of inference. This soulless nature of the scientific world need not worry those who are persuaded that the main significances of our environment are of a more spiritual character.

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.

Out of the numbers proceeds that harmony of natural law which it is the aim of science to disclose. We can grasp the tune but not the player. Trinculo might have been referring to modern physics in the words: 'This is the tune of our catch, played by the picture of Nobody.

When we encounter unexpected obstacles in finding out something which we wish to know, there are two possible courses to take. It may be that the right course is to treat the obstacle as a spur to further efforts; but there is a second possibility - that we have been trying to find something which does not exist. You will remember that that was how the relativity theory accounted for the apparent concealment of our velocity through the aether.

All I would claim is that those who in the search for truth start from consciousness as a seat of self-knowledge with interests and responsibilities not confined to the material plane, are just as much facing the hard facts of experience as those who start from consciousness as a device for reading the indications of spectroscopes and micrometers.

The revelation by modern physics of the void within the atom is more disturbing than the revelation by astronomy of the immense void of interstellar space.

If in a community of the blind one man suddenly received the gift of sight, he would have much to tell which would not be at all scientific.

The frank realisation that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.

It was a grand triumph but not one easily understood. The skeptical Silverstein came up to Eddington and said that people believed that only three scientists in the world understood general relativity. He had been told that Eddington was one of them. The shy Quaker said nothing. "Don't be modest, Eddington," said Silverstein. Replied Eddington, "On the contrary, I'm just wondering who the third might be.

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.

A star is drawing on some vast reservoir of energy by means unknown to us. This reservoir can scarcely be other than the subatomic energy which, it is known exists abundantly in all matter; we sometimes dream that man will one day learn how to release it and use it for his service. The store is well nigh inexhaustible, if only it could be tapped. There is sufficient in the Sun to maintain its output of heat for 15 billion years.

according to the Second Law, there is an inescapable loss of energy in the universe. And, if the world machine is really running down and approaching the heat death, then it follows that one moment is no longer exactly like the last. You cannot run the universe backward to make up for entropy. Events over the long term cannot replay themselves. And this means that there is a directionality or, as Eddington later called it, an “arrow” in time.

It would probably be wiser to nail up over the door of the new quantum theory a notice, 'Structural alterations in progress - No admittance except on business', and particularly to warn the doorkeeper to keep out prying philosophers.

In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. The sparsely spread nuclei of electric force become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow. Nor does the alchemy stop here. In the transmuted world new significances arise which are scarcely to be traced in the world of symbols; so that it becomes a world of beauty and purpose - and, alas, suffering and evil.

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.

The epithet “revolutionary” is usually reserved for two great modern developments – the Relativity Theory and the Quantum Theory. These are not merely new discoveries as to the content of the world; they involve changes in our mode of thought about the world.

The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. … if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

We take as building material relations and relata. The relations unite the relata; the relata are the meeting-points of the relations. The one is unthinkable apart from the other. I do not think that a more general starting-point of structure could be conceived.

If the laws of physics are not strictly causal the most that can be said is that the behaviour of the conscious brain is one of the possible behaviours of a mechanical brain. Precisely so; and the decision between the possible behaviours is what we call volition.

A new phase of the quantum revolution was launched in 1913, when Niels Bohr came up with a revised model for the structure of the atom. Six years younger than Einstein, brilliant yet rather shy and inarticulate, Bohr was Danish and thus able to draw from the work on quantum theory being done by Germans such as Planck and Einstein and also from the work on the structure of the atom being done by the Englishmen J. J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford. “At the time, quantum theory was a German invention which had scarcely penetrated to England at all,” recalled Arthur Eddington.

Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience. It is not at all necessary that every individual symbol that is used should represent something in common experience or even something explicable in terms of common experience. The man in the street is always making this demand for concrete explanation of the things referred to in science; but of necessity he must be disappointed. It is like our experience in learning to read. That which is written in a book is symbolic of a story in real life. The whole intention of the book is that ultimately a reader will identify some symbol, say BREAD, with one of the conceptions of familiar life. But it is mischievous to attempt such identifications prematurely, before the letters are strung into words and the words into sentences. The symbol A is not the counterpart of anything in familiar life.

Of course, it would have been even more exciting if Einstein had trusted his original equations and simply announced that his general theory of relativity predicted that the universe is expanding. If he had done that, then Hubble’s confirmation of the expansion more than a decade later would have had as great an impact as when Eddington confirmed his prediction of how the sun’s gravity would bend rays of light. The Big Bang might have been named the Einstein Bang, and it would have gone down in history, as well as in the popular imagination, as one of the most fascinating theoretical discoveries of modern physics.52

To the question whether I would admit that the cause of the decision of the atom has something in common with the cause of the decision of the brain, I would simply answer that there is no cause. In the case of the brain I have a deeper insight into the decision; this insight exhibits it as volition, i.e. something outside causality.

It will be noticed that the fundamental theorem proved above bears some remarkable resemblances to the second law of thermodynamics. Both are properties of populations, or aggregates, true irrespective of the nature of the units which compose them; both are statistical laws; each requires the constant increase of a measurable quantity, in the one case the entropy of a physical system and in the other the fitness, measured by m, of a biological population. As in the physical world we can conceive the theoretical systems in which dissipative forces are wholly absent, and in which the entropy consequently remains constant, so we can conceive, though we need not expect to find, biological populations in which the genetic variance is absolutely zero, and in which fitness does not increase. Professor Eddington has recently remarked that 'The law that entropy always increases—the second law of thermodynamics—holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature'. It is not a little instructive that so similar a law should hold the supreme position among the biological sciences. While it is possible that both may ultimately be absorbed by some more general principle, for the present we should note that the laws as they stand present profound differences—-(1) The systems considered in thermodynamics are permanent; species on the contrary are liable to extinction, although biological improvement must be expected to occur up to the end of their existence. (2) Fitness, although measured by a uniform method, is qualitatively different for every different organism, whereas entropy, like temperature, is taken to have the same meaning for all physical systems. (3) Fitness may be increased or decreased by changes in the environment, without reacting quantitatively upon that environment. (4) Entropy changes are exceptional in the physical world in being irreversible, while irreversible evolutionary changes form no exception among biological phenomena. Finally, (5) entropy changes lead to a progressive disorganization of the physical world, at least from the human standpoint of the utilization of energy, while evolutionary changes are generally recognized as producing progressively higher organization in the organic world.

Let us begin with the fine-structure constant. ... The fine-structure constant is really the ratio of two natural units or atoms of action. ... We obtain action when we multiply energy by time. ... We are challenged to find a unified theory of electric particles and radiation in which the electrostatic type of action and the quantum type of action are traced to their source.

This analysis of the phenomenal world tallies well enough with contemporary physics. A physicist would remind us that the things we see “out there” are not ultimately separate from each other and from us; we perceive them as separate because of the limitations of our senses. If our eyes were sensitive to a much finer spectrum, we might see the world as a continuous field of matter and energy. Nothing in this picture resembles a solid object in our usual sense of the word. “The external world of physics,” wrote Sir Arthur Eddington, “has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we remove the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions.” Like the physicists, these ancient sages were seeking an invariant. They found it in Brahman.

In physics we have outgrown archer and apple-pie definitions of the fundamental symbols. To a request to explain what an electron really is supposed to be we can only answer, "It is part of the A B C of physics". The external world of physics has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions.

In the1920s the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington hypothesized that star energy comes from nuclear fusion and proton-electron annihilation and insisted that star interiors provided an environment hot enough to allow for such reactions. Finally, during the 1930s advances in nuclear physics made it clear that nuclear reactions drive solar radiation, and by the end of the decade it became clear how they proceed. The simplest possible sequence begins with the fusion of two protons to form heavy hydrogen (deuterium) and was suggested first by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker in 1937 and properly quantified by Charles Critchfield and Hans Bethe soon afterward. This reaction also produces a positron and a neutrino, and the deuterium fuses with another proton to produce an isotope of helium and releases an order of magnitude more energy than the first reaction.

Enigmas answered. Not only is QFT the answer to Einstein's search, it also answers or resolves his Enigmas, and in a way that can be understood by the man (or woman) on the street. In Appendix A you will see how the paradoxes of special relativity become natural and understandable consequences of the way fields behave. In Appendix B you will see that the problematic curvature of space-time in general relativity is gone; in QFT gravity is just another force field and space and time are the same space and time we intuitively believe in. Finally, in Appendix C you will see how the infamous wave-particle duality of QM is eliminated because there are no particles - only fields - and hence there is no duality. However abandoning the familiar picture of solid particles and replacing it with intangible fields is not easy. It will require a leap of imagination greater than did the atomic picture that Eddington struggled with.

Each electron wants the whole of three-dimensional space for its waves; so Schrodinger generously allows three dimensions for each of them. For two electrons he requires a six-dimensional sub-aether. He then successfully applies his method on the same lines as before. I think you will see now that Schrodinger has given us what seemed to be a comprehensible physical picture only to snatch it away again. His sub-aether does not exist in physical space; it is in a 'configuration space' imagined by the mathematician for the purpose of solving his problems, and imagined afresh with different numbers of dimensions according to the problem proposed. It was only an accident that in the earliest problems considered the configuration space had a close correspondence with physical space, suggesting some degree of objective reality of the waves. Schrodinger's wave mechanics is not a physical theory but a dodge - and a very good dodge too.

The suggestion that the body really wanted to go straight but some mysterious agent made it go crooked is picturesque but unscientific. It makes two properties out of one; and then we wonder why they are always proportional to one another - why the gravitational force on different bodies is proportional to their inertia or mass. The dissection becomes untenable when we admit that all frames of reference are on the same footing. The projectile which describes a parabola relative to an observer on the earth's surface describes a straight line relative to the man in the lift. Our teacher will not easily persuade the man in the lift who sees the apple remaining where he released it, that the apple really would of its own initiative rush upwards were it not that an invisible tug exactly counteracts this tendency. (The reader will verify that this is the doctrine the teacher would have to inculcate if he went as a missionary to the men in the lift.)

To leave the atom constituted as it was but to interfere with the probability of its undetermined behaviour, does not seem quite so drastic an interference with natural law as other modes of mental interference that have been suggested. (Perhaps that is only because we do not understand enough about these probabilities to realize the heinousness of our suggestion.) Unless it belies its name, probability can be modified in ways which ordinary physical entities would not admit of. There can be no unique probability attached to any event or behaviour; we can only speak of 'probability in the light of certain given information,' and the probability alters according to the extent of the information. It is, I think, one of the most unsatisfactory features of the new quantum theory in its present stage that it scarcely seems to recognize this fact, and leaves us to guess at the basis of information to which its probability theorems are supposed to refer.

Religious creeds are a great obstacle to any full sympathy between the outlook of the scientist and the outlook which religion is so often supposed to require ... The spirit of seeking which animates us refuses to regard any kind of creed as its goal. It would be a shock to come across a university where it was the practice of the students to recite adherence to Newton's laws of motion, to Maxwell's equations and to the electromagnetic theory of light. We should not deplore it the less if our own pet theory happened to be included, or if the list were brought up to date every few years. We should say that the students cannot possibly realise the intention of scientific training if they are taught to look on these results as things to be recited and subscribed to. Science may fall short of its ideal, and although the peril scarcely takes this extreme form, it is not always easy, particularly in popular science, to maintain our stand against creed and dogma.

Supongamos que un ictiólogo está explorando la vida del océano. Introduce una red en el agua y pesca todo un surtido en pescados. Inspeccionando sus presas, procede en la forma usual de un científico, con el objeto de sistematizar sus descubrimientos. Llega a dos generalizaciones: a)      Ninguna criatura del mar es más chica de dos pulgadas; b) todas las criaturas del mar tienen agallas. Ambas son ciertas para su cosecha, y él asume tentativamente que seguirán siendo ciertas cuantas veces repita la pesca. Aplicando esta analogía, la pesca es el cuerpo de conocimientos que constituyen la ciencia física, y la red, el equipo sensorial e intelectual que usamos para obtenerlo. El lanzamiento de la red corresponde a la observación: ya que conocimiento que no haya sido o que no pueda ser obtenido por observación no se admite en la ciencia física. Un espectador podría objetar diciendo que la primera generalización es falsa: “existen muchas criaturas del mar con un tamaño menor a las dos pulgadas, lo que sucede es que tu red no se adapta para pescarlos”. El ictiólogo desprecia la objeción desdeñosamente: -Lo que sea impescable por la red queda ipso facto fuera del alcance del conocimiento ictiológico, y no es parte del reino de peces que se han definido como tema del conocimiento ictiológico. En otras palabras, lo que mi red no puede pescar no es un pez-; O -para traducir la analogía-: -Si tú no estás simplemente inventando, estás considerando un conocimiento del universo físico descubierto en una forma distinta a la usada por las ciencias físicas y claramente no verificable por esos métodos, tú eres metafísico, ¡Bah! Cuando el ictiólogo rechazó la sugerencia del espectador acerca de un reino objetivo de los peces, por considerarla metafísica, y explicó que su propósito era descubrir leyes, es decir, generalizaciones que fueran verdaderas para todos los peces pescables, yo esperaría que el espectador se fuera refunfuñando: “Apuesto que él no llega muy lejos con su ictiología de los peces pescables; me pregunto cómo será su teoría acerca de la reproducción de los peces pescables. Está muy bien el descartar los peces bebé como especulación metafísica; pero a mí me parece que son parte del problema”. Sir Arthur Eddington.

In ancient days two aviators procured to themselves wings. Daedalus flew safely through the middle air across the sea, and was duly honored on his landing. Young Icarus soared upwards towards the sun till the wax melted which bound his wings, and his flight ended in fiasco. In weighing their achievements perhaps there is something to be said for Icarus. The classic authorities tell us that he was only "doing a stunt," but I prefer to think of him as the man who certainly brought to light a constructional defect in the flying machines of his day. So too in science. Cautious Daedalus will apply his theories where he feels most confident they will safely go; but by his excess of caution their hidden weaknesses can not be brought to light. Icarus will strain his theories to the breaking-point till the weak joints gape. For a spectacular stunt? Perhaps partly; he is often very human. But if he is not yet destined to reach the sun and solve for all time the riddle of its constitution, yet he may hope to learn from his journey some hints to build a better machine

It all called to mind the British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington’s memorable explanation of how the universe works: “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.” But the best part is: I don’t need to know what.

Because it is harder to measure smaller things by relating their positions and momenta to those of other known objects, uncertainty is much greater at the atomic level than at the astronomical level. Therefore, quantum uncertainty is not a fundamental feature of nature but the result of human inability to measure everything in the universe with absolute precision. (Eddington)

Said the physicist Eddington: “We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature. We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! it is our own.” This is not to say that the real world

When the electron vibrates, the universe shakes." Physicists now accept interconnectedness as a rule principle, along with many forms of symmetry that extend across the universe — for example, it is theorized that every black hole may be matt. Which sort of description will satisfy Bell's criteria for a fully integrated, non-local reality? It would have to be a quantum theory, because if gravity is present everywhere at the same time, if black holes know what white holes are doing, and if a difference of spin in one particle induces an equal but opposite transition immediately in its counterpart somewhere in outer space, it is clear that the information going from one location to another travels faster than the speed of light. In ordinary reality, that is not allowed either by Newton or Einstein. Contemporary theorists like the British physicist, David Bohm, who worked extensively with the implications of Bell's theorem, had to assume that there is an "invisible field" that holds together all reality, a field that has the property of knowing what is happening everywhere at once. (The invisible term here means not only invisible to the eye but undetectable to any measurement instrument.) Without going deeper into these speculations, one can see that the unseen environment sounds very much like the inherent intellect of DNA, and both behave very much like the subconscious. The mind has the property of holding all of our ideas in place, so to speak, in a silent reservoir where they are organized precisely into concepts and categories. By naming it "thought," we may be watching nature think through many different channels, one of the most fortunate of which our minds are, because the mind will construct and feel the physical truth at the same time. It may seem completely rational to observe a quantum phenomenon in the context of light waves, but what if quantum truth was just as apparent in our own feelings, impulses and desires? Eddington once expressed flatly his assumption as a scientist that "the world's stuff is mind-stuff." Thus the quantum mechanical system, as knowledge creation, has a possible position in non-local reality.

The influence of the sensory equipment with which we observe, and the intellectual equipment with which we formulate the results of observation as knowledge, is so far reaching that by itself it decides the number of particles into which matter in the universe appears to be divided.

Within the whole domain of experience [only] a selected portion is capable of that exact representation which is requisite for development by the scientific method.

With about 95 possible characters on a standard keyboard, that implies that the number of possible books is 951,312,000, a rather large number when one considers that there are only (according to Arthur Eddington [1882–1944]) 1.580 electrons in the universe.

In other words, Eddington’s proposal is that consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter. It is consciousness, for Eddington, that breathes fire into the equations of physics.

Eddington’s panpsychism was not dualistic. His view was not that particles have two sets of properties: physical properties (mass, charge, spin, etc.) on the one hand and nonphysical consciousness properties on the other. The view is rather that the physical properties of a particle (mass, spin, charge, etc.) are themselves forms of consciousness.

The world of “modern” knowledge is like the universe of Eddington, expanding by diffusion until it approaches the point of nullity. What the defenders of present civilization usually mean when they say that modern man is better educated than his forebears is that he is literate in larger numbers.

I can see no more reason for preferring the theories of fifty years ago than for preferring the observational data of fifty years ago.

Feynman himself, halfway through his freshman year, reading Eddington’s book about relativity theory, confronted his own department chairman with the classic question about mathematics: What is it good for? He got the classic answer: If you have to ask, you are in the wrong field.

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

I spoke of the 'real' mathematics of Fermat and other great mathematicians, the mathematics which has permanent aesthetic value, as for example the best Greek mathematics has, the mathematics which is eternal because the best of it may, like the best literature, continue to cause intense emotional satisfaction to thousands of people after thousands of years. These men were all primarily pure mathematicians; but I was not thinking only of pure mathematics. I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among 'real' mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are, at present at any rate, almost as 'useless' as the theory of numbers. It is the dull and elementary parts of applied mathematics, as it is the dull and elementary parts of pure mathematics, that work for good or ill.

Following the path of earlier unificationists, one of Eddington's aims was to reduce the contingencies in the description of nature, for example, by explaining the fundamental constants of physics rather than accepting them as merely experimental data. One of these constants was the fine-structure constant ..., which entered prominently in Dirac's theory and was known to be about 1/137.

Perhaps we are being a bit presumptuous in calling our species “intelligent.” After all, this species has waged numerous inane wars where millions of their own were slaughtered. As a whole, this species spends trillions of hours a year watching insipid television shows. And “intelligent” is not the right name for a species that invented spam e-mails and encourages narcissistic pastimes like Facebook. Nevertheless, over the millennia, this species produced many shining lights that make us worthy of the lofty title: Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton, David Hume, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Arthur Stanley Eddington, Emmy Noether, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Meryl Streep, and, of course, tiramisu.

What was so odd was that quite a lot of people, not just sheep but highly intelligent people, did apparently believe it. T. S. Eliot, for instance. Or Eddington—in fact, quite a few physicists, the very last people one would expect to be taken in by it. Philosophers, too. Was it possible—was there any chance—that there was more to it than I had thought? No, certainly not. Of course not! Still, it was odd. Damned odd.

For ten years we have had to divide modern science into two compartments: we have one set of beliefs in the classical compartment and another set of beliefs in the quantum compartment. Unfortunately, our compartments are not watertight. We must, of course, look forward to an ultimate reconstruction of our conceptions of the physical world which will embrace both the classical laws and the quantum laws in harmonious association. There are still some who think that the reconciliation will be effected by a development of classical conceptions. But the physicists of what I may call "the Copenhagen school" believe that the reconstruction has to start at the other end, and that in the quantum phenomena we are getting down to a more intimate contact with Nature’s way of working than in the coarse-grained experience which has furnished the classical laws.

Truth, honor, justice—were these real forces, real “forms” under the relativity theory? These were the questions with which Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington were wrestling, and their answers gave Lanny Budd the courage he needed to go on living his lonely secret life.

Qué enorme gusto sentí el día que supe que el patriarca de los científicos «graduados» modernos, el gran Albert Einstein, tenía como libro de cabecera nada menos que La Doctrina Secreta, obra de la reina del esoterismo —tan denostada por la ciencia de a pie— Helena Petrovna Blavatski. Y cómo se alegró mi espíritu cuando leí Cuestiones cuánticas: escritos místicos de los físicos más famosos del mundo (Heisenberg, Schröedinger, Einstein, Jeans, Planck, Pauli, Eddington), editado por Ken Wilber (Kairós, 1987).

En Cuestiones cuánticas quise demostrar cómo y por qué estos grandes físicos eran todos místicos y dejé que explicaran con elocuencia y por sí mismos por qué consideraban que «la mística es la emoción más hermosa que podemos experimentar» (Einstein), que «el mecanismo exige un misticismo» (de Broglie), que existimos «en la mente de algún Espíritu eterno» (Jeans), que «en nuestra época y en nuestros días, el mito, manifiesto o tácito, es una síntesis que abarca tanto el entendimiento racional como la experiencia mística de la unidad» (Wolfang Pauli) y que la relación más importante es «la que el alma humana mantiene con el espíritu divino» (Eddington).