Arthur Eddington Quotes

The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory.

You cannot disturb the tiniest petal of a flower without the troubling of a distant star.

Something unknown is doing we don't know what-that is what our theory amounts to.

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

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'.

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 but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

Events do not happen; they are just there, and we come across them.

Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers.

Whatever else there may be in our nature, responsibility toward truth is one of its attributes.

The pursuit of truth in science transcends national boundaries. It takes us beyond hatred and anger and fear. It is the best of us.

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.

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 foot-print 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 foot-print. And Lo! it is our own.

Do not put too much confidence in experimental results until they have been confirmed by theory.

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

I ask you to look both ways. For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.

If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum.

Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to me ... I should like to find a genuine loophole.

In Einstein's theory of relativity the observer is a man who sets out in quest of truth armed with a measuring-rod. In quantum theory he sets out with a sieve.

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

Never accept a fact until it has been verified by theory.

It cannot be denied that for a society which has to create scarcity to save its members from starvation, to whom abundance spells disaster, and to whom unlimited energy means unlimited power for war and destruction, there is an ominous cloud in the distance though at present it be no bigger than a man's hand.

I believe there are 15, 747, 724, 136, 275, 002, 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.

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. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them.

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

Time is the supreme Law of nature.