Arthur Stanley Eddington

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Arthur Stanley Eddington was an English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician. Per Wikipedia, "The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars, or the radiation generated by accretion onto a compact object, is named in his honour."

Eddinton's Terms

Actuality, The Background, The Story Teller

Quotes

" The modern scientific theories have broken away from the common standpoint which identifies the real with the concrete. I think we might go so far as to say that time is more typical of physical reality than matter, because it is freer from those metaphysical associations which physics disallows. It would not be fair, being given an inch, to take an ell, and say that having gone so far physics may as well admit at once that reality is spiritual. We must go more warily. But in approaching such questions we are no longer tempted to take up the attitude that everything which lacks concreteness is thereby self-condemned."

"We have dismissed all preconception as to the background of our pointer readings, and for the most part we can discover nothing as to its nature. But in one case—namely, for the pointer readings of my own brain—I have an insight which is not limited to the evidence of the pointer readings. That insight shows that they are attached to a background of consciousness."[1]

"The fact that matter is "knowable to Mr. X" must be set down as one of the fundamental attributes of matter. I" "[2]

Footnotes

  1. Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929), 259. Italics added.
  2. Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929), 264.