Eddington : Sir Arthur Stanley (1882-1944), British astronomer, physicist & mathematician. He was a pioneer in the fields of relativity, cosmology, & the internal constitution of the stars. He was also a writer on science & the philosophy of science.
... miracle. A scientific law is a pure deduction from the mind's own disposition. Eddington goes so far as to say that if a scientist is sufficiently introspective he can trace out from within his brain each and every law of Nature which he took so much pains to fish out from Nature by observation and experiment. Eddington gives an analogy to explain the nature of scientific law and scientific discovery... factual translation. This is arguing in a circle, a thorough-going mentalist like Eddington would say. What are facts ? What is life ? Anything more than what the senses and the mind have built up for us? Jeans himself is on the horns of a dilemma.1 Being a scientist, and not primarily a mathematician like Eddington, he cannot very well acquiesce in the liquidation of the material world; nor can... original sin of the observer's interference, indeed may not the laws be nothing else but that? Thus Science has landed into the very heart— the bog and quagmire, if you like—of abstruse metaphysics. Eddington says, there is no other go for Science today but to Page 233 admit and delcare that its scheme and pattern of things, as described by what is called laws of Nature, is only a mental ...
... Russell is not, I believe, a great scientist or preeminent in any field of science. Eddington is, I am told, one of the finest Page 532 authorities in astrophysics. Jeans and Eddington, though not great discoverers, are otherwise in the front rank. Russell ranks as a great mathematician, but there too Eddington has one superiority over him; he is supposed to be the only one, so say some, one... same I shall see if there is anything that can be said in the matter. 1932 Russell, Eddington, Jeans I don't understand why Amal expects me to bow to the criticism of Bertrand Russell. 5 (1.) Russell's opinions are as much determined by his up bringing, temperament etc. as those of Jeans or Eddington. He was born in the heyday of the most uncompromising materialism; he is unwilling to change... Russell, however, is an eminent philosopher, though not one of the great ones. I would count him rather as a strong and acute thinker on philosophy and science. Here he has an advantage, for Jeans and Eddington are only amateur philosophers with a few general ideas for their stock in trade. (3.) As for their general intellectual standing Russell is a clear and strong materialistic intellect with a wide ...
... any attempt at aligning with a mystical view of the universe the revolution in scientific thought which Einstein brought about. But Eddington suggests that Einstein's remark must be under- stood in the context of the times in which it was made. In those days, Eddington, explains, one had to become expert in dodging persons who were persuaded that Einstein's four- dimensional continuum was what spir... Sherlock Holmes to their missing perceptual equivalents? Perfectly easy, my dear Watson! We have only to fall into the arms of Eddington and agree with him to regard the "lumber" equations as the mathematical symbols of unperceived properties of some- thing objective. To Eddington, even perceived properties of the world are subjective in the Kantian sense that they are Page 48 imposed... spiritualistic seances were supposed to reveal: Einstein's hasty evasion was therefore not surprising. But, according to Eddington, the compartments into which human thought is divided are not water- tight: fundamental progress in one cannot be a matter of indifference to the rest. He caustically offers an analogy: "Natural selection is a purely scientific theory. If in the early days of Darwinism ...
... miracle. A scientific law is a pure deduction from the mind's own disposition. Eddington goes so far as to say that if a scientist is sufficiently introspective he can trace out from within his brain each and every law of Nature which he took so much pains to fish out from Nature by observation and experiment. Eddington gives an analogy to explain the nature of scientific law and scientific discovery... factual translation. This is arguing in a circle, a thorough-going mentalist like Eddington would say. What are facts? What is life? Anything more than what the senses and the mind have built up for us? Jeans himself is on the horns of a dilemma.1 Being a scientist, and not primarily a mathematician like Eddington, he cannot very well acquiesce in the liquidation of the material world; nor can... original sin of the observer's interference, indeed may not the laws be nothing else but that? Thus Science has landed into the very heart – the bog and quagmire, if you like – of abstruse metaphysics. Eddington says, there is no other go for Science today but to Page 313 admit and delcare that its scheme and pattern of things, as described by what is called laws of Nature, is only a mental ...
... accepted by Eddington: "Progress of time introduces more and more of the random element into the constitution of the world" 38 — "Like other physical quantities time enters [our consciousness]...as a particular measurable relation between events in the outside world..." 39 The sole thing Eddington does not grant is that... there is a single direction of change. To the subjective awareness this is the direction of time. The direction of time, or time's arrow as Eddington put it, we perceive from the operation of the law of entropy... This law...stands for a definite trend in the natural order. And this trend points to a direction in time... indefinitely sustainable phenomenon of the future. The law of entropy, let us remember, is an empirical discovery and carries no a priori validity. Eddington has argued, along with all other physicists, that if the universe is held to run down completely at some calculable future point, we must postulate a calculable ...
... therefore would not be a solid if something in the subtle dimension did not maintain it. Only, it is not visible to the physical eye but can be seen with the subtle eye. Disciple : Sir Arthur Eddington in his Gifford Lectures (1934) says that science began with the aim of reducing the complexity of the material world to a great simplicity. But now, it seems, science has not been able to keep its... its promise and no model of the material universe is possible. A good deal of mathematics and specialisation is necessary now to understand what science says about the material world. Eddington says that the table on which he is writing is not merely a piece of wood. Scientifically Page 89 speaking, it is a conglomeration of electrical particles, called Electrons, moving at a very... knowledge is not dependent on physical science alone. Physical science is only one side of knowledge. The poet's and the mystic's and the artist's experience have equal validity. Disciple : Eddington argues that even in so-called objective scientific knowledge it is mind that is asked to judge ultimately. 8x4 is 32 and not 23, why? Sri Aurobindo : It is:, by an intuition and repetition ...
... deals with all that, with the Whole.” 31 One of Wilber’s least known books is Quantum Questions , in which he examines the sources of the thought that created 20th century physics: Einstein, Eddington, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli … some of whom he quotes extensively. “Everyone of the physicists in this volume was a mystic,” he writes. “They simply believed, to a man, that if modern physics... incapable of grasping the Whole. “They all shared a profoundly spiritual or mystical worldview, which is perhaps the last thing one would expect from pioneering scientists.” 32 Wilber quotes Arthur Eddington: “Briefly the position is this. We have learned that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath... everything into question. An important factor here is that religion was no longer part of the equation. Spirituality, or “mysticism”, or “the oceanic feeling,” yes; dogmatic religion, no. For Einstein, Eddington, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli – to name only the best-known – re-thinking the universe in the terms of physics was their life task. In their quest, time and again, they found resonances and references ...
... case because in trying to observe the phenomena they interfere with the process and thus vitiate it. This they now call indeterminacy. SRI AUROBINDO: The attempts of scientists like Jeans and Eddington to find Reality by science are futile. You can't found metaphysics on physical science; for, when you have built your philosophy, after some thirty years or so science will change and your building... metaphysics depend on physics. PURANI: The Continental scientists have now refused to build philosophy on science. They say it is not their business to explain but only to lay bare the process. Eddington says in his Gifford Lectures that the human mind, the subject, ultimately accepts one conclusion out of a number of conclusions not because of the nature of objective reality but because of the nature... rainbow exists for the scientist and not for the poet. SRI AUROBINDO: I should say it exists for neither. Only the scientists get excited over the process and the poets over the result. PURANI: Eddington also admits that we have no ground to say that non-scientific knowledge and experience are less real than physical science. SRI AUROBINDO: Of course not. PURANI: Did you read Spengler's Decline ...
... knowledge is of their "pointer-readings", not of the qualities and as a result it leaves us open-minded as to what reality is. Developing out of this open-mindedness there are the celebrated Jeans-Eddington trends: what began as a tremendous stress on the physical has, in an important domain of Science, ended in a doubt in the mind of one scientific school whether the physical universe is its own... the line once drawn between the actual spatio-temporal phenomena and the hypothetical mystery of God. In addition, it has suggested a change in our idea of Nature's laws. Both in Jeans and Eddington you will Page 24 observe the disposition to consider the nineteenth century's "laws of iron" statistical and nothing more. So the obsession about decay and death ...
... test Einstein's theory that light is subject to gravitational forces. Sir Arthur Eddington took the measurements of the photographs and later said that this experience stayed in his memory as the greatest moment in his life. Fellows of the Royal Society rushed the news to one another: Page 252 Eddington by telegram to the mathematician Littlewood, and Littlewood in a hasty note to Bertrand ...
... and Marxist scientists in particular belong to a different category from Jeans and Eddington. But the important point is this: a considerable body of scientists frankly hold the "idealist" view, and these come from the very front rank qua scientists. Discussion arises when it is seriously put forward that Eddington and Jeans are not authorities in science equalling any other great names; as if it ...
... support or establish spiritual truth—spiritual truth can exist in itself and needs no such buttressing from outside. Page 391 I think X bases his ideas on the attempt of Jeans, Eddington and other English scientists to thrust metaphysical conclusions into scientific facts; it is necessary that he should appreciate fully the objections of more austerely scientific minds to such a mixture... opposing lines. The defect in what X writes about Science seems to be that he is insisting vehemently on the idea that Science is still materialistic or at least that scientists, Jeans and Eddington excepted, are still fundamentally materialists. This is not the fact. Most continental scientists have now renounced the idea that Science can explain the fundamentals of existence. They hold that ...
... the theory of relativity and the change that is coming in among scientists—for instance, Jeans and Eddington. SRI AUROBINDO: But scientists don't recognise any metaphysics—except perhaps some scientists in America. On the Continent no recognition is given to the metaphysical views of Jeans or Eddington. The scientists there say that Science is concerned only with explaining the processes of the universe; ...
... 319 -La Physique Nouvelle et les Quanta, 319n Democritus, 326 Descartes, 321 Dirac, 318 Drona, 80 Du Noiiy, Lecomte, 260 Duryadhona, 80 EDDINGTON, 313-14, 317-19, 326, 332 Egypt, 106, 119, 127, 177n., 219, 223, 236, 238-41 Einstein, 139, 304, 308, 314-16, 325, 334, 401 Eliot, T. S., 115, 192-3, 195 -The Waste ...
... 2 Is it then to say that science is no longer science, it has now been converted into philosophy, even into idealistic philosophy ? Page 221 In spite of Russell and Eddington who may be considered in this respect as counsellors of despair, the objective reality of the scientific field stands, it is asserted, although somewhat changed. Now, there are four positions ...
... brain and the senses. If into that there intrude hopes, desires, feelings of the heart, life or imagination, Page 235 then in place of science there will emerge romance, fiction. Eddington and Lodge, despite their being great scientists, have not escaped this fault. They have always brought in extraneous things and mixed them up with things scientific. This is the mental attitude or ...
... instances of the past. Leaving aside the examples of Newton, Kepler and Tycho Brahe, even in the world of to-day it is not rare to find more than one scientist who believes in God. In this respect Lodge, Eddington, Einstein and Planck are outstanding figures that require no introduction. It is generally said that a scientist may indeed be a God-believer, but not in the capacity of a scientist. The faculty by ...
... 175. "It would be wrong to condemn the alleged knowledge of the unseen world because it is unable to follow the tines of deduction laid down by science as appropriate to the seen world..." A.S. Eddington, Science and the Unseen World. Page 136 impossible by the aid of the ordinary positive reason to test the data of spiritual experience and decide whether those things exist or ...
... the new Light. Religion is coming again to the forefront of human thought, and even theology is shed- ding off its habitual narrowness to embrace the wider horizons of human aspiration. Keyserling, Eddington, Einstein, Jung and P. Sorokin—all now meet on a common platform, not always easy to define yet perceptible on an intuitive approach, a platform of many-aspected idealism, heralding the advent of ...
... become extremely possessive where his life’s work, his theory of transmutationism with its irksome problems, was at stake. In this he did not differ from Newton or, in more recent years, Kelvin or Eddington, and many others. Nevertheless, “the attitude of Darwin and the Darwinians towards Lamarck bestows honour neither on their intelligence nor on their intellectual honesty,” writes Pichot, 30 ...
... of them extensively. His conclusion is clear and convincing. The physicists who worked out the two great revolutions of relativity and quantum mechanics – Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Eddington, and others – were also profound philosophers and even, Wilber writes, mystics. The reason was that they felt themselves confronted with the essence of things, with Reality as such and with everything ...
... in some other it had to be considered in a corpuscular form. So it was like the Mad Hatter's tea-party where tea was served on such and such days and coffee on the rest of the days of the week! (Eddington.) For the real nature of light is hidden from us. We only know its two complementary aspects: wave-property and particle-property. And it is the same thing with electron. (Louis de Broglie, Mati ...
... "unobservable" in very principle - will give them no standing ground. What the basis of modem physics permits is best indicated by an analogy employed by Whittaker on page 145 of From Euclid to Eddington. "Suppose," writes Whittaker, "that a child with a penny comes to an automatic machine which supplies chocolate when the penny is put in one slot, and sweets when the penny is put in the other slot ...
... mortals at the most unexpected of moments. Generally speaking, scientists and doctors know nothing of it, since they cannot either measure, quantify or scan it. As the renowned English physicist Eddington admitted: "Any attempt to scientifically measure a subjective experience is like trying to find the square root of a sonnet." The deepest mystery known to mankind is that of all-inclusive ...
... Is it then to say that science is no longer science, it has now been converted into philosophy, even into idealistic philosophy? Page 325 In spite of Russell and Eddington who may be considered in this respect as counsellors of despair, the objective reality of the scientific field stands, it is asserted, although somewhat changed. Now, there are four positions ...
... science? Science is concerned with the process of things. If science wants to know the fundamental truth, it has to go beyond process. That is why the continental scientists do not agree with Jeans and Eddington. They say that it is not within the scope of science to be busy with the metaphysical aspect of things. It is concerned, as I said, with process; if it goes beyond that, it is no longer science. Do ...
... Aurobindo used in The Life Divine . Nolini Sen had pointed out that scientists didn't use it in that sense, so the term was changed to "light-cycle". Jatin Bal supplied many quotations from Jeans, Eddington, etc., on various points. In our discussion Sri Aurobindo refused to accept Time as a dimension of Space. Purani noted, in connection with the complicated mathematical formulas involved, that scientists ...
... Beauty, in fact, is nearer to that ultimate supraintellectual Reality, for its knowledge is directly attained by an act of identity and is not indirect like that of science. Sir Arthur Eddington in his Gifford lectures has discussed this question of validity of knowledge. He says that the claim of physical science that the rainbow exists to give the knowledge of the difference in the wa ...
... aspect Beauty, in fact, is nearer to that ultimate supraintellectual Reality, for its knowledge is directly attained by an act of identity and is not indirect life that of science. Sir Arthur Eddington in his Gifford Lectures has discussed this question of validity of knowledge. He says that the claim of physical science that the rainbow exists to give the knowledge of the difference in the wave-lengths ...
... province of the greater psychology awaiting its hour before which these poor gropings will disappear and come to nothing." In another letter he wrote to me in reply to a question of mine about Eddington's 'Science and the Unseen World': "The part about the changed attitude of modem science to its own field of discovery is interesting. The latter part about religious experience I find very feeble; ...
... higher and higher organisation proceed indefinitely? The answer of science was "No " We must reach a moment of time when the energy was wholly organised with none of the random element in it. In Eddington's phrases: "The organisation we are concerned with is exactly definable, and there is a limit at which it becomes perfect. There is not an infinite series of states of higher and still higher organisation: ...
... Page 256 destined to overcome somehow all the intervening conditions. In the course of the telefinalistic evolution, however, several phenomena of "anti-chance" (to quote a term of Eddington's) occur because God has willed them: these cannot be explained by the natural trend of things according to the laws of probability and elude scientific analysis. The two most outstanding among them ...
... his trying to lighten it, is one of the common and obvious metres which are almost proof against subtlety of movement. It may be mathematically more equivalent to ______________________ 1. Eddington's book. Science and the Unseen World. Page 138 Page 139 yours, but there is an underrunning lilt of celestial dance in your rhythm which he tries to get but, because ...
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