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Quotes by Sir Arthur Eddington

English astronomer (1882 - 1944)

In Einstein's theory of relativity the observer is a man who sets out in quest of truth armed with a measuring-rod. In quantum theory he sets out with a sieve.

We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because 'two' is 'one and one.' We forget that we have still to make of a study of 'and.'

We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and'.

Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers.

We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.

Something unknown is doing we don't know what.

Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.

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.

It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.

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.

The mathematics is not there till we put it there.

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

It is a primitive form of thought that things exist or do not exist.