“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… — Arthur Stanley Eddington Copy Share Image
“The simpler elements of the scientific world have no immediate counterparts in everyday experience; we use them to build things which have counterparts.” — Arthur Stanley Eddington Copy Share Image
“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… — Arthur Stanley Eddington Copy Share Image
“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.” — Arthur Stanley Eddington Copy Share
“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… — Arthur Stanley Eddington Copy Share
“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… — Arthur Stanley Eddington Copy Share Image
“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… — Arthur Stanley Eddington Copy Share
“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.… — Arthur Stanley Eddington Copy Share
“The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. … if your theory is found to… — Arthur Stanley Eddington Copy Share Image
“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… — Arthur Stanley Eddington Copy Share
“Out of the numbers proceeds that harmony of natural law which it is the aim of science to disclose. We can grasp the tune… — Arthur Stanley Eddington Copy Share Image
“Let us begin with the fine-structure constant. ... The fine-structure constant is really the ratio of two natural units or atoms of action. ...… — Arthur Stanley Eddington Copy Share Image
“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… — Arthur Stanley Eddington Copy Share Image
