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Arthur Eddington
Arthur Eddington
- I shall use the phrase ‘time's arrow’ to express this one-way property of time which has no analogue in space.The Nature of the Physical World (1928) ch. 4
- If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum.The Nature of the Physical World (1928); see Wilensky
- If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation—well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.The Nature of the Physical World (1928) ch. 14
- I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun— a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet, head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body.The Nature of the Physical World (1928) ch. 15
- I ask you to look both ways. For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.Stars and Atoms (1928) Lecture 1
