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Other authors named Arthur:
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Author's popularity: 4
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If you like or dislike this author in general or one or more of their quotes in particular, please give us your feedback by clicking on the icon to vote for, or the icon to vote against them.
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Popularity: 3
Vote: | But are we sure of our observational facts? Scientific men are rather fond of saying pontifically that one ought to be quite sure of one's observational facts before embarking on theory. Fortunately those who give this advice do not practice what they preach. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it doesn't. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Human life is proverbially uncertain; few things are more certain than the solvency of a life-insurance company. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | If your theory is found to be against the second law of theromodynamics, I give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset. |
Popularity: 9
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | It is sound judgment to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Life would be stunted and narrow if we could feel no significance in the world around us beyond that which can be weighed and measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | Oh leave the Wise our measures to collate. One thing at least is certain, light has weight. One thing is certain and the rest debate. Light rays, when near the Sun, do not go straight. |
Popularity: 8
Vote: | Probably the simplest hypothesis... is that there may be a slow process of annihilation of matter. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself. |
Popularity: 10
Vote: | Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Schrodinger's wave-mechanics is not a physical theory, but a dodge - and a very good dodge too. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Shuffling is the only thing which Nature cannot undo. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | Something unknown is doing we don't know what. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | The mathematics is not there till we put it there. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The quest of the absolute leads into the four-dimensional world. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | The solution goes on famously; but just as we have got rid of all the other unknowns, behold! V disappears as well, and we are left with the indisputable but irritating conclusion: 0 = 0. This is a favourite device that mathematical equations resort to, when we propound stupid questions. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | There once was a brainy baboon, Who always breathed down a bassoon, For he said, "It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune". |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | To the pure geometer the radius of curvature is an incidental characteristic - like the grin of the Cheshire cat. |
Popularity: 8
Vote: | We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | 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 lo! It is our own. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind put into nature. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | 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 still have to make a study of "and." |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | 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'. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Who will observe the observers? |
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Biography
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Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (December 28, 1882 – November 22, 1944) was arguably the most important astrophysicist from the early 20th century. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity that can be radiated by accretion onto a compact object, is named in his honour.
He is famous for his work regarding the Theory of Relativity. Eddington wrote an article, Report on the relativity theory of gravitation, which announced Einstein's theory of general relativity to the English-speaking world. Because of World War I, new developments in German science were not well known in England.
In 1924 he won the Bruce Medal, the Henry Draper Medal and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. He won the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1928. He was knighted in 1930, and received the Order of Merit in 1938.
The Eddington Crater on the Moon is named after him, as are the asteroid 2761 Eddington and the Royal Astronomical Society's Eddington Medal.
Biography Early years
Eddington was born in Kendal, England, son of Quaker parents. His father, Arthur Henry Eddington, taught at a Quaker training college in Lancashire before moving to Kendal to become headmaster of Stramongate School. He died in the typhoid epidemic which swept England in 1884. His mother, Sarah Ann Stout, came from Darlington and was also from a Quaker family. When his father died, she was left to bring up Arthur and his older sister with relatively little income. The family moved to Weston-super-Mare where at first Arthur was educated at home before spending three years at a preparatory school.
In 1893 Arthur entered Brymelyn School. He proved to be a brilliant scholar and excelled in mathematics and English literature. His records won him a 60 pounds scholarship in 1898, and was able to attend Owens College in Manchester once he turned 16 later that year. He spent the first year in a general course, but turned to physics for the next three years. Eddington was greatly influenced by one of his mathematics teachers, Horace Lamb. His progress continued to be rapid, winning him several additional scholarships and allowing him to graduate with a B.Sc. with First Class Honours in 1902.
Based on his performance at Owens, he was awarded a 75 pound scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1903. He graduated with a masters in 1905, and entered the Cavendish Laboratory researching thermionic emission. This did not go well so he returned to mathematics, but appeared to not enjoy this very much.
Astronomy
After leaving university later in 1905, Eddington's first full-time position was as the chief assistant to the Astronomer Royal at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. He was put to work on the detailed analysis parallax of Eros on photographic plates that had started in 1900. He developed a new statistical method based on the apparent drift of two background stars, winning him the Smith's Prize in 1907.
The prize won him a Trinity College Fellowship. In December 1912 George Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, died suddenly and Eddington was promoted to his chair as the Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy in early 1913. Later that year, Robert Ball, holder of the theoretical Lowndean chair also died, and Eddington was named the director of the entire Cambridge Observatory the next year. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society shortly thereafter.
During World War I, Eddington was called up for military service. Being a Quaker and a pacifist, he refused to serve in the army as a conscientious objector, and wanted to be allowed to do alternative service instead. Scientific friends of his solved the problem by successfully arguing to relieve him from military duty because of his importance for science.
After the war, Eddington travelled to the island of Principe near Africa to watch the solar eclipse of May 29 1919. During the eclipse, he took pictures of the stars in the region around the Sun. According to the general theory of relativity, stars near the Sun would appear to have been slightly shifted because their light had been curved by its gravitational field. This effect is noticeable only during an eclipse, since otherwise the Sun's brightness obscures the stars. Newtonian gravitation predicted half the shift of general relativity. Reportedly, Eddington's proof of general relativity contained a manipulated set of data that excluded items that did not fit Einstein's theory (John Waller, Einstein's Luck).
The expedition was a major factor in and ultimately helped to discriminate between the two theories. This relativistic shift was indeed found, and was a major science story around the world. It is also the source of the urban rumor that only three people understand relativity; when asked by a reporter who suggested this, Eddington jokingly replied "Oh, who's the third?"
Eddington also investigated the interior of stars through theory, and developed the first true understanding of stellar processes. He modelled stars as gas in radiative equilibrium; the star was stabilized by gravity pulling in, and gas pressure (temperature) and radiation pressure pushing out. Noting that the temperatures meant that the atoms in stars would be almost entirely ionized, he theorized that they would behave as almost-ideal gases, thereby making the mathematics much more tractable.
With these assumptions, he demonstrated that the interior temperature of stars must be millions of degrees. He discovered the mass-luminosity relationship for stars, he calculated the abundance of hydrogen and he produced a theory to explain the pulsation of Cepheid variable stars.
In 1920, Eddington, on the basis of the precise measurements of atomic weights by F. W. Aston, was the first to suggest that stars obtained their energy from nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium. This was the first suggestion that stars obtained their energy from nuclear fusion, over which he had a long running argument with James Jeans. Later, in 1938 and 1939, Hans Bethe introduced the theory for the fusion, which made the process seem rather "natural" and the debate generally ended.
Throughout this period Eddington lectured on relativity, and was particularly well known for his ability to explain the concepts in lay terms as well as scientific. He collected many of these into the Mathematical Theory of Relativity in 1923, which Albert Einstein suggested was the finest presentation of the subject in any language.
Fundamental theory
During 1920s until his death, he increasingly concentrated on what he called "fundamental theory" which was intended to be a unification of quantum theory, relativity and gravitation. At first he progressed along "traditional" lines, but turned increasingly to an almost numerological analysis of the dimensionless ratios of fundamental constants. His work was increasingly seen as "crankish", and he became something of a science pariah in his later years.
His basic approach was to combine several fundamental constants in order to produce a dimensionless number. In many cases these would result in numbers close to 10, its square, or its cube root. He was convinced that the mass of the proton and the charge of the electron, were a natural and complete specification for constructing a Universe and that their values were not accidental.
A particularly damaging statement in his defence of these concepts involved the fine structure constant α. At the time it was measured to be very close to 1/136, and he argued that the value should in fact be exactly 1/136 for various reasons. Later measurements placed the value much closer to 1/137, at which point he switched his line of reasoning and claimed that the value should in fact be exactly 1/137, the Eddington number. At this point most other researchers stopped taking his concepts very seriously. The current measured value is estimated at 1/137.035 999 76(50).
He did not complete this line of research before his death in 1944, and his book entitled Fundamental Theory was published posthumously in 1946. Eddington died in Cambridge, England.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Arthur Eddington".
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