Arthur S Eddington - Collected Quotes

"Our model of Nature […] should be like an engine with movable parts. We need not fix the position of any one lever; that is to be adjusted from time to time as the latest observations indicate. The aim of the theorist is to know the train of wheels which the lever sets in motion - that binding of the parts which is the soul of the engine." (Arthur S Eddington," The Internal Constitution of Stars", Nature Vol. 106 (2603), 1920) 

"It is quite commonly said that scientific theories about the world are neither true nor false but merely convenient or inconvenient." (Arthur S Eddington, “The Nature of the Physical World”, 1928)

"Matter and all else that is in the physical world have been reduced to a shadowy symbolism." (Arthur S Eddington, “The Nature of the Physical World”, 1928)

"Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience." (Sir Arthur S Eddington, "The Nature of the Physical World", 1928)

"So far as physics is concerned, time's arrow is a property of entropy alone." (Arthur S Eddington, “The Nature of the Physical World”, 1928)

"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." (Sir Arthur S Eddington, "The Nature of the Physical World" , 1928)

"With fuller knowledge we should sweep away the references to probability and substitute the exact facts." (Sir Arthur S Eddington, "The Nature of the Physical World" , 1928) 

"If our so-called facts are changing shadows, they are shadows cast by the light of constant truth." (Sir Arthur S Eddington, "Science and the Unseen World", 1929)

"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 [...]" (Arthur S Eddington, "Science and the Unseen World", 1929)

"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." (Arthur S Eddington, "Science and the Unseen World", 1929)

"Our environment may and should mean something towards us which is not to be measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician." (Arthur S Eddington, "Science and the Unseen World", 1929)

"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." (Arthur S Eddington, "Science and the Unseen World", 1929)

"A scientist commonly professes to base his beliefs on observations, not theories [...] have never come across anyone who carries this profession into practice. [...] Observation is not sufficient [...]  theory has an important share in determining belief." (Arthur S Eddington, "The Expanding Universe", 1933)

"In the end what we comprehend about the universe is precisely that which we put into the universe to make it comprehensible." (Arthur S Eddington, "The Relativity Theory of Protons and Electrons", 1936) 

"The mathematics is not there till we put it there." (Arthur S Eddington, "The Philosophy of Physical Science", 1938)

"We have discovered that it is actually an aid in the search for knowledge to understand the nature of the knowledge we seek." (Arthur S Eddington, "The Philosophy of Physical Science", 1938)

"It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset." (Sir Arthur S Eddington)

"Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself. In physics we are generally content to sacrifice before the lesser shrine of Plausibility." (Sir Arthur S Eddington)

"The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory." (Arthur S Eddington)