To the pure geometer the radius of curvature is an incidental characteristic – like the grin of the Cheshire cat. To the physicist it is an indispensable characteristic. It would be going too far to say that to the physicist the cat is merely incidental to the grin. Physics is concerned with interrelatedness such as the interrelatedness of cats and grins. In this case the cat without a grin and the grin without a cat are equally set aside as purely mathematical fantasies.
—Arthur Eddington
Topics: Mathematics
Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings.
—Arthur Eddington
If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum.
—Arthur Eddington
Topics: Time
We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own.
—Arthur Eddington
Topics: Mankind, Man
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.
—Arthur Eddington
Topics: Stars
Falling in love is one of the activities forbidden that tiresome person, the consistently reasonable man.
—Arthur Eddington
Topics: Instincts
It cannot be denied that for a society which has to create scarcity to save its members from starvation, to whom abundance spells disaster, and to whom unlimited energy means unlimited power for war and destruction, there is an ominous cloud in the distance though at present it be no bigger than a man’s hand.
—Arthur Eddington
Life would be stunted and narrow if we could feel no significance in the world around us beyond that which can be weighed and measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician.
—Arthur Eddington
Topics: Nature
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