Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

“ Cannot theology dispose of the destinies of the human soul in a non-material way without trespassing on the realm of science? Cannot science assert its conclusions as to the geometry of the space-time continuum without trespassing on the realm of theology? According to the assertion above science and theology can make what mistakes they please provided that they make them in their own territory; they cannot quarrel if they keep to their own realms. ”

“ It is the aim of physical science, so far as its scope extends, to lay bare the fundamental structure underlying the world; but science has also to explain if it can, or else humbly to accept, the fact that from this world have arisen minds capable of transmuting the bare structure into the richness of our experience. It is not misrepresentation but rather achievement—the result perhaps of long ages of biological evolution—that we should have fashioned a familiar world out of the crude basis. It is a fulfilment of the purpose of man’s nature. ”

“ I am compounded of that mental activity which is from your point of view a nest of illusion, so that to accord with my own nature I have to transform even the world explored by my senses. But I am not merely made up of senses; the rest of my nature has to live and grow. I have to render account of that environment into which it has its outlet. My conception of my spiritual environment is not to be compared with your scientific world of pointer readings; it is an everyday world to be compared with the material world of familiar experience. ”

“ I am not so rash as to invade Scotland with a solution of a problem which has rent her from the synod to the cottage. Like most other people, I suppose, I think it incredible that the wider scheme of Nature which includes life and consciousness can be completely predetermined; yet I have not been able to form a satisfactory conception of any kind of law or causal sequence which shall be other than deterministic. It seems contrary to our feeling of the dignity of the mind to suppose that it merely registers a dictated sequence of thoughts and emotions ”

“ And yet when I hear to-day protests against the Bolshevism of modern science and regrets for the old-established order, I am inclined to think that Rutherford, not Einstein, is the real villain of the piece. When we compare the universe as it is now supposed to be with the universe as we had ordinarily preconceived it, the most arresting change is not the rearrangement of space and time by Einstein but the dissolution of all that we regard as most solid into tiny specks floating in void. That gives an abrupt jar to those who think that things are more or less what they seem. ”

“ If I were to try to put into words the essential truth revealed in the mystic experience, it would be that our minds are not apart from the world; and the feelings that we have of gladness and melancholy and our yet deeper feelings are not of ourselves alone, but are glimpses of a reality transcending the narrow limits of our particular consciousness—that the harmony and beauty of the face of Nature is at root one with the gladness that transfigures the face of man. ”

“ Not the stars this time but universes stretch one behind the other beyond sight. Does this distribution too come to an end? It may be that imagination must take another leap, envisaging super-systems which surpass the spiral nebulae as the spiral nebulae surpass the stars. But there is one feeble gleam of evidence that perhaps this time the summit of the hierarchy has been reached, and that the system of the spirals is actually the whole world. As has already been explained the modern view is that space is finite—finite though unbounded. ”

“ In physics we are generally content to sacrifice before the lesser shrine of Plausibility. And even the pure mathematician—that stern logician—reluctantly allows himself some prejudgments; he is never quite convinced that the scheme of mathematics is flawless, and mathematical logic has undergone revolutions as profound as the revolutions of physical theory. We are all alike stumblingly pursuing an ideal beyond our reach. In science we sometimes have convictions as to the right solution of a problem which we cherish but cannot justify ”

“ Just as matter must shed its conception of substantiality, so existence must shed its halo, before we can admit it into physical science. But clearly if we are to assert or to question the existence of anything not comprised in the external world of physics, we must look beyond the physical definition. The mere questioning of the reality of the physical world implies some higher censorship than the scientific method itself can supply. ”

“ If the nebular physicists try to construct a square they will construct an oblong. No test can ever reveal to them that it is not a square; the greatest advance they can make is to recognise that there are people in another world who have got it into their heads that it is an oblong, and they may be broadminded enough to admit that this point of view, absurd as it seems, is really as defensible as their own. It is clear that their whole conception of space is distorted as compared with ours, and ours is distorted as compared with theirs. ”

“ Like the critic I do not think Nature has been particularly subtle in concealing which frame she prefers. It is just that she is not enthusiastic about frames of space. They are a method of partition which we have found useful for reckoning, but they play no part in the architecture of the universe. Surely it is absurd to suppose that the universe is planned in such a way as to conceal its plan. ”

“ We treat it in what seems to be its obvious position as the avenue of approach to the reality and significance of the world, as it is the avenue of approach to all scientific knowledge of the world. Or does he regard consciousness as something which unfortunately has to be admitted but which it is scarcely polite to mention? Even so we humour him. We have associated consciousness with a background untouched in the physical survey of the world and have given the physicist a domain where he can go round in cycles without ever encountering anything to bring a blush to his cheek. ”

“ At present we can see no way in which an attack on the second law of thermodynamics could possibly succeed, and I confess that personally I have no great desire that it should succeed in averting the final running-down of the universe. I am no Phoenix worshipper. This is a topic on which science is silent, and all that one can say is prejudice. But since prejudice in favour of a never-ending cycle of rebirth of matter and worlds is often vocal, I may perhaps give voice to the opposite prejudice. ”

“ It is difficult to school ourselves to treat the physical world as purely symbolic. We are always relapsing and mixing with the symbols incongruous conceptions taken from the world of consciousness. Untaught by long experience we stretch a hand to grasp the shadow, instead of accepting its shadowy nature. Indeed, unless we confine ourselves altogether to mathematical symbolism it is hard to avoid dressing our symbols in deceitful clothing. When I think of an electron there rises to my mind a hard, red, tiny ball ”

“ We have acknowledged that the entities of physics can from their very nature form only a partial aspect of the reality. How are we to deal with the other part? It cannot be said that that other part concerns us less than the physical entities. Feelings, purpose, values, make up our consciousness as much as sense-impressions. We follow up the sense-impressions and find that they lead into an external world discussed by science; we follow up the other elements of our being and find that they lead—not into a world of space and time, but surely somewhere. ”

“ Human life is proverbially uncertain; few things are more certain than the solvency of a life-insurance company. The average law is so trustworthy that it may be considered predestined that half the children now born will survive the age of years. But that does not tell us whether the span of life of young A. McB. is already written in the book of fate, or whether there is still time to alter it by teaching him not to run in front of motor-buses. The eclipse in 1999 is as safe as the balance of a life-insurance company; the next quantum jump of an atom is as uncertain as your life and mine. ”

“ Mathematics is the model of exact inference; and in physics we have endeavoured to replace all cruder inference by this rigorous type. Where we cannot complete the mathematical chain we confess that we are wandering in the dark and are unable to assert real knowledge. Small wonder then that physical science should have evolved a conception of the world consisting of entities rigorously bound to one another by mathematical equations forming a deterministic scheme. ”

“ It is not even scientific modesty, because the attitude is often one of naïve surprise that Nature should have hidden her fundamental secret successfully from such powerful intellects as ours. It is simply that we have turned a corner in the path of progress and our ignorance stands revealed before us, appalling and insistent. There is something radically wrong with the present fundamental conceptions of physics and we do not see how to set it right. ”

“ I shall have to emphasise elsewhere that the whole of our physical knowledge is based on measures and that the physical world consists, so to speak, of measure-groups resting on a shadowy background that lies outside the scope of physics. Therefore in conceiving a world which had existence apart from the measurements that we make of it, I was trespassing outside the limits of what we call physical reality. ”

“ As we change from one observer to another—from one flat space-time frame to another—the scene of activity of the demon shifts. It is never where our observer is, but always away yonder. Is not the solution now apparent? The demon is simply the complication which arises when we try to fit a curved world into a flat frame. In referring the world to a flat frame of space-time we distort it so that the phenomena do not appear in their original simplicity. Admit a curvature of the world and the mysterious agency disappears. Einstein has exorcised the demon. ”

“ When I close my eyes and retreat into my inner mind, I feel myself enduring, I do not feel myself extensive. It is this feeling of time as affecting ourselves and not merely as existing in the relations of external events which is so peculiarly characteristic of it; space on the other hand is always appreciated as something external.
That is why time seems to us so much more mysterious than space. We know nothing about the intrinsic nature of space, and so it is quite easy to conceive it satisfactorily. We have intimate acquaintance with the nature of time and so it baffles our comprehension. ”

“ Consider a world—Utopia, let us say—governed by all the laws of Nature known and unknown which govern our own world, but containing better stars, planets, cities, animals, etc.—a world which might exist, but it just happens that it doesn’t. How can the physicist test that Utopia is not the actual world? We refer to a piece of matter in it; it is not real matter but it attracts any other piece of (unreal) matter in Utopia according to the law of gravitation. ”

“ I cannot read any significance into a physical world when it is held before me upside down, as happened just now. For that reason I am interested in entropy not only because it shortens calculations which can be made by other methods, but because it determines an orientation which cannot be found by other methods.
The scientific world is, as I have often repeated, a shadow-world, shadowing a world familiar to our consciousness. Just how much do we expect it to shadow? We do not expect it to shadow all that is in our mind, emotions, memory, etc. ”

“ But I can make no suggestion to evade the deadlock.
Turning again to the other end of time, there is one school of thought which finds very repugnant the idea of a wearing out of the world. This school is attracted by various theories of rejuvenescence. Its mascot is the Phoenix. Stars grow cold and die out. May not two dead stars collide, and be turned by the energy of the shock into fiery vapour from which a new sun—with planets and with life—is born? This theory very prevalent in the last century is no longer contemplated seriously by astronomers. ”

“ We all know that there are regions of the human spirit untrammelled by the world of physics. In the mystic sense of the creation around us, in the expression of art, in a yearning towards God, the soul grows upward and finds the fulfilment of something implanted in its nature. The sanction for this development is within us, a striving born with our consciousness or an Inner Light proceeding from a greater power than ours. ”

“ We try to express much the same truth when we say that the physical entities are only an extract of pointer readings and beneath them is a nature continuous with our own. But I do not willingly put it into words or subject it to introspection. We have seen how in the physical world the meaning is greatly changed when we contemplate it as surveyed from without instead of, as it essentially must be, from within. By introspection we drag out the truth for external survey; but in the mystical feeling the truth is apprehended from within and is, as it should be, a part of ourselves. ”

“ We do not ask how mass gets a grip on space-time and causes the curvature which our theory postulates. That would be as superfluous as to ask how light gets a grip on the electromagnetic medium so as to cause it to oscillate. The light is the oscillation; the mass is the curvature. There is no causal effect to be attributed to mass; still less is there any to be attributed to matter. The conception of matter, which we associate with these regions of unusual contortion, is a monument erected by the mind to mark the scene of conflict. ”

“ Scientific discovery is like the fitting together of the pieces of a great jig-saw puzzle; a revolution of science does not mean that the pieces already arranged and interlocked have to be dispersed; it means that in fitting on fresh pieces we have had to revise our impression of what the puzzle-picture is going to be like. One day you ask the scientist how he is getting on ”

“ At the moment I am not insisting on the shadowy and symbolic character of the world of physics because of its bearing on philosophy, but because the aloofness from familiar conceptions will be apparent in the scientific theories I have to describe. If you are not prepared for this aloofness you are likely to be out of sympathy with modern scientific theories, and may even think them ridiculous—as, I daresay, many people do. ”