Arthur Eddington

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

by Michael Strevens  · 12 Oct 2020

survive—either Einstein’s or Newton’s—or, if both predictions turned out to be wrong, neither. Six months after the eclipse, the expedition leader Arthur Eddington announced the results: Newton was dethroned and Einstein was declared the new emperor of gravitation. The Great War was finally over, and Einstein’s esoteric

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of a systematic Brazilian astrographic breakdown—were twisted by his hopes and expectations for what that truth might be. Figure 7.2. Albert Einstein and Arthur Eddington enjoy a quiet moment together at the University of Cambridge Observatory in 1930. All this is, of course, just to repeat and to underscore the

Big Bang

by Simon Singh  · 1 Jan 2004  · 492pp  · 149,259 words

later, Schwarzschild was dead. He had contracted a fatal disease on the Eastern front. While Schwarzschild volunteered to fight, his counterpart at the Cambridge Observatory, Arthur Eddington, refused to enlist on principle. Raised as a devout Quaker, Eddington made his position clear: ‘My objection to war is based on religious grounds…Even

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feel sorry for the Good Lord. The theory is correct anyway.’ Figure 28 Albert Einstein, who developed the theoretical framework of general relativity, and Sir Arthur Eddington, who proved it by observing the 1919 eclipse. This photograph was taken in 1930, when Einstein visited Cambridge to collect an honorary degree. Einstein’s

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were two ways of arriving at the truth’, he said. ‘I decided to follow them both.’ After ordination, Lemaître spent a year in Cambridge with Arthur Eddington, who described him as ‘a very brilliant student, wonderfully quick and clear-sighted, and of great mathematical ability’. The following year he went to America

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I wonder whether there may not be a greater scale of existence of things, in which it is no more than a puff of smoke. ARTHUR EDDINGTON Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But I have no doubt that the lion belongs to it even though he cannot totally

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years later Hubble published his observations which showed that the galaxies were indeed receding, and Lemaître was vindicated at last. Lemaître had previously written to Arthur Eddington about his Big Bang model, but had received no reply. When Hubble’s discovery hit the headlines, Lemaître wrote to Eddington again, hoping that this

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light completely. At best, they argued, it could account for only a tiny fraction of the observed redshift. On behalf of the Big Bang camp, Arthur Eddington summarised what he thought was wrong with Zwicky’s theory: ‘Light is a queer thing—queerer than we imagined twenty years ago—but I should

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studying the stars, returning home early in the morning. Fred’s early fascination with astronomy was reinforced at the age of twelve when he read Arthur Eddington’s Stars and Atoms. Eventually Hoyle was persuaded to give the British education system a chance. He settled down at Bingley Grammar School and then

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he earned a place as a Ph.D. student at Cambridge, working alongside such greats as Rudolf Peierls, Paul Dirac, Max Born and his hero, Arthur Eddington. After earning his doctorate in 1939 he was elected a fellow of St John’s College, and his research began to focus on the evolution

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the heavier elements were not created in the moments immediately after the Big Bang, then the problem was clear: where and when were they created? Arthur Eddington had already put forward one possible theory about nucleosynthesis: ‘I think the stars are the crucibles in which lighter atoms are compounded into more complex

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newspaper is prepared to splash a broad-brush exposition of a cosmological model across its front page, then it is a strong indication that, as Arthur Eddington would have put it, the Big Bang model has moved from the theoretical workshop into the scientific showroom. Yet this does not mean that the

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Bragg, On Giants’ Shoulders (Sceptre, 1999) Twelve of history’s greatest scientists are profiled, including several who played a role in the development of cosmology. Arthur Eddington, The Expanding Universe (CUP, 1988) This entertaining and popular essay about the expanding universe hypothesis was written in 1933, when the concept of the Big

Day We Found the Universe

by Marcia Bartusiak  · 6 Apr 2009  · 412pp  · 122,952 words

the spirals' sizes and the brightness of their novae only made sense if they were milky ways at great distance. The highly respected English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington was captivated by the vast breadth of this idea; it engaged his theoretical fantasies. “If the spiral nebulae are within the stellar system [the Milky

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waning days of World War I, but Shapley couldn't wait that long to spread the news. On January 8, 1918, he wrote the noted Arthur Eddington in England that “now, with startling suddenness and definiteness, [the cluster studies] seem to have elucidated the whole sidereal structure”—in other words, the architecture

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Shapley's worries; the most ardent believers in external galaxies still held fast to their convictions—not only Curtis but also such major players as Arthur Eddington, W. W. Campbell, and V. M. Slipher. It was the undecideds who were most affected by Shapley's arguments and so remained huddled on the

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wasn't just a vague prediction; the equations of general relativity accounted for Mercury's extra 43 arcseconds of shift per century with utmost precision. Arthur Eddington, for one, was immediately smitten by Einstein's groundbreaking opus. “Whether the theory ultimately proves to be correct or not, it claims attention as being

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“people seem to forget that I am an astronomer and that relativity is only a side issue,” he lamented after one wearying interview with reporters. Arthur Eddington (AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives) For Eddington to serve as a spokesman for a radical new theory was somewhat out of character for him. He

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observed universe at all. His solution depended on the cosmos being empty, but the universe was undoubtedly chock-full of matter. In the ensuing discussion, Arthur Eddington casually wondered aloud why only two cosmological models—Einstein's and de Sitter's—had so far come out of general relativity to describe the

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom

by Graham Farmelo  · 24 Aug 2009  · 1,396pp  · 245,647 words

.28 At that time, there were no science journalists, so Dirac and his friend Wiltshire had to rely on popular articles written by scientists, notably Arthur Eddington, the Quaker astronomer and mathematician at the University of Cambridge and the only person in Britain to have mastered the theory. He had even got

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the country’s most famous scientists soon after he arrived. Among them was the man who had introduced him to the technicalities of relativity theory, Arthur Eddington. He was a young-looking forty-year-old, always neatly dressed in his three-piece suit, the knot of his dark tie poised just below

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it will not shock experimental physicists too much if I say that we do not accept their observations unless they are confirmed by theory. SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON, 11 September 19331 The character of Paul Dirac first appeared on stage in a special version of Faust, the Hamlet of German literature. Goethe’s

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation

by David Bodanis  · 25 May 2009  · 349pp  · 27,507 words

, retired from her professorship at Harvard, she remembered the rows of braying young men, nervously trying to do what their teacher expected of them. But Arthur Eddington, a quiet Quaker, was also at the university, and he was happy to take her on as a tutorial student. Although his reserve never lifted

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newspaper, back in Berlin. He hadn’t been invited along. In fact, it was a cool Englishman we’ve already met who led the team. Arthur Eddington wore small metalrimmed glasses, was medium height and barely medium weight, and spoke in sentences that tapered off whenever he had to pause for thought

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as a conscientious objector. The Home Office was not impressed, and began proceedings to send him to one of the prisons. What Else Einstein Did Arthur Eddington aip emilio segrè visual archives This is the point at which the Astronomer Royal, Frank Dyson, called attention to the remarkable eclipse opportunity. If Dyson

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worry . . .”: Albert Einstein, the Human Side, Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 8. notes 210 “Attention was called . . .”: Arthur Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), p. 114. 213 “Dear Russell . . .”: The telegram from the mathematician J. E. Littlewood appears on p

Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

by Paul Halpern  · 13 Apr 2015  · 282pp  · 89,436 words

the Sun. Finlay-Freundlich’s inability to complete his expedition was a great disappointment to him. Einstein quietly began to correspond with a British astronomer, Arthur Eddington, who was keenly interested in verifying Einstein’s theory. According to several widely reported stories, Eddington was known at the time as one of the

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professorship in October of that year. Once again he tried to ignore politics, focusing on his research. He had become intrigued by recent proposals by Arthur Eddington for uniting quantum physics with general relativity and explaining uncertainty through cosmological arguments. Thus in the midst of Austria’s turmoil, his gaze was fixed

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the Beginning of Everything (New York: Bantam, 2014). Goenner, Hubert, “Unified Field Theories: From Eddington and Einstein up to Now,” in Proceedings of the Sir Arthur Eddington Centenary Symposium, edited by V. de Sabbata and T. M. Karade, 1:176–196 (Singapore: World Scientific, 1984). Greene, Brian, Fabric of the Cosmos: Space

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, quoted in “News and Views,” Nature, February 2, 1929, reprinted in Hubert Goenner, “On the History of Unified Field Theories,” in Proceedings of the Sir Arthur Eddington Centenary Symposium, edited by V. de Sabbata and T. M. Karade, 1:176–196 (Singapore: World Scientific, 1984). 12. H. H. Sheldon, quoted in “Einstein

Coming of Age in the Milky Way

by Timothy Ferris  · 30 Jun 1988  · 661pp  · 169,298 words

Lectures of Isaac Barrow. Chicago: Open Court, 1916. Choquet-Bruhat, Y., and T.M. Karade. On Relativity Theory. Singapore: World Scientific, 1984. Proceedings of an Arthur Eddington centenary symposium. Christianson, Gale E. In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times. New York: Free Press, 1984. Cicero. De Fato, trans

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe

by William Poundstone  · 3 Jun 2019  · 283pp  · 81,376 words

for a whole nation. But there are many ways for polls to be skewed and for observations to be distorted by selection effects. British physicist Arthur Eddington gave a classic example in his 1939 book, The Philosophy of Physical Science. Wanting to know the size of the smallest fish in a pond

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to account for its value. This seems to cry out for an explanation. Several twentieth-century thinkers sacrificed their reputations on that altar, most notoriously Arthur Eddington. In spirit Eddington was a Pythagorean, a man who preferred to believe the world sings the unheard music of whole numbers. Eddington claimed that the

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet

by Arthur Turrell  · 2 Aug 2021  · 297pp  · 84,447 words

bring a little nearer to fulfilment our dream of controlling this latent power for the well-being of the human race, or for its suicide.” —Arthur Eddington, “The Internal Constitution of the Stars,” 19201 Who are the fusion pioneers aiming, like Prometheus, to steal the secret of fire from the heavens? The

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will one day learn to release it and use it for his service. The store is well-nigh inexhaustible, if only it could be tapped.” —Arthur Eddington, “The Internal Constitution of the Stars,” 19201 This book is about scientists’ attempts to unlock energy from within the atom, and the star builders owe

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four hydrogens. This difference seems small and inconsequential, but it is the very reason why nuclear fusion works. The physicist and great popularizer of science Arthur Eddington was struck by this apparent mistake in the arithmetic of the universe. Eddington was a nuclear visionary, suggesting long before Rutherford’s fusion experiment that

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—the stars are not hot enough. The critics lay themselves open to an obvious retort; we tell them to go and find a hotter place.” —Arthur Eddington, 19271 Nature is good at fusion. Really, really good. It’s galling for the star builders. On Earth, they’re trying to build the most

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the road for fusion reactions. These stars gracefully retire as “white dwarfs”—smaller, brighter stars that gradually cool. They do have their surprises though; as Arthur Eddington put it, they’re so dense that a ton of their plasma could fit in a matchbox.9 Medium stars have similar masses to our

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars

by Jo Marchant  · 15 Jan 2020  · 544pp  · 134,483 words

-life solar eclipse predicted for May 29, 1919. Their mission was to measure the deflection of starlight during the eclipse, a problem that lead scientist Arthur Eddington described as “weighing light.” No wonder surrealist Breton was fascinated. Now it was the scientists’ turn to leave behind the comforts of common sense, and

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know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little,” he said, “it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.” Arthur Eddington, whose 1919 eclipse observations confirmed Einstein’s theory of relativity, built on Russell’s argument in 1928. In fact, he pointed out, there’s one

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373 (2015): 20140287; Peter Coles, “Einstein, Eddington and the 1919 Eclipse,” in Historical Development of Modern Cosmology, ASP Conference Proceedings 252 (2001): 21. “weighing light”: Arthur Eddington, “The Total Eclipse of 1919 May 29 and the Influence of Gravitation on Light,” The Observatory 42 (1919): 121. He presented his theory: Longair, “Bending

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, 2009), 171; quoted in Galen Strawson, “A Hundred Years of Consciousness: ‘A Long Training in Absurdity,’” Estudios de Filosofia 59 (2019): 9–43. See also Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World: The Gifford Lectures 1927 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1928), 259. It seems “rather silly”: Quoted in Galen Strawson

Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science

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The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

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Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

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What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge

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Wonders of the Universe

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From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time

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