Arthur Eddington Quotes
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There once was a brainy baboon,Who always breathed down a bassoon,For he said, 'It appearsThat in billions of yearsI shall certainly hit on a tune'.
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The essential difference, which we meet in entering the realm of spirit and mind, seems to hang round the word 'Ought.'
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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.
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The whole subject-matter of exact science consists of pointer readings and similar indications.
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The mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions.
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The chairs and tables around us which broadcast to us incessantly those signals which affect our sight and touch cannot in their nature be like unto the signals or to the sensations which the signals awake at the end of their journey.
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We have to build the spiritual world out of symbols taken from our own personality, as we build the scientific world out of the symbols of the mathematician.
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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.
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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.
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Experimental Physicist Phys. I cannot imagine myself perceiving non-Euclidean space!Math. Look at the reflection of the room in a polished doorknob, and imagine yourself one of the actors in what you see going on there.
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Mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience; all else is remote inference.
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Our story of evolution ended with a stirring in the brain-organ of the latest of Nature's experiments; but that stirring of consciousness transmutes the whole story and gives meaning to its symbolism. Symbolically it is the end, but looking behind the symbolism it is the beginning.
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To those who have any intimate acquaintance with the laws of chemistry and physics the suggestion that the spiritual world could be ruled by laws of allied character is as preposterous as the suggestion that a nation could be ruled by laws like the laws of grammar.
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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.
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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'.
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As truly as the mystic, the scientist is following a light; and it is not a false or an inferior light.
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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.
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It is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they are confirmed by theory.
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All change is relative. The universe is expanding relatively to our common material standards; our material standards are shrinking relatively to the size of the universe. The theory of the 'expanding universe' might also be called the theory of the 'shrinking atom'. <...>
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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.
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It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.
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Physics has in the main contented itself with studying the abridged edition of the book of nature.
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I think it is not irreligion but a tidiness of mind, which rebels against the idea of permeating scientific research with a religious implication.
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If our so-called facts are changing shadows, they are shadows cast by the light of constant truth. So too in religion we are repelled by that confident theological doctrine... but we need not turn aside from the measure of light that comes into our experience showing us a Way through the unseen world.