Argument
Arthur Eddington
Overview
Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (28 December 1882 – 22 November 1944) was an English astrophysicist and mathematician. 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.
Around 1920, he foreshadowed the discovery and mechanism of nuclear fusion processes in stars in his paper "The Internal Constitution of the Stars". At that time, the source of stellar energy was a complete mystery; Eddington was the first to correctly speculate that the source was fusion of hydrogen into helium.
Eddington wrote a number of articles that announced and explained Einstein's theory of general relativity to the English-speaking world. World War I had severed many lines of scientific communication, and new developments in German science were not well known in England. He also conducted an expedition to observe the solar eclipse of 29 May 1919 on the Island of Príncipe that provided one of the earliest confirmations of general relativity. As a populariser of science, he became known for his popular expositions and interpretations of Einstein's theory. As a philosopher of science, Eddington speculated on the implications of quantum mechanics on mind and matter.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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The three principal sources of our knowledge concerning atoms have been the light they emit, X-rays and radio-activity. As everyone knows, when the light emitted by a glowing gas is passed through a prism, it is found to consist of well-defined lines of different colours, which are characteristic for each element, and constitute what is called its “spectrum”. The spectrum extends beyond the range of visible light…
Bertrand Russell, Philosophy
States what Arthur Eddington is; the author is tied to Arthur Eddington in the knowledge graph.
Picture to yourselves the waves on the ocean, and reckon from crest to crest of successive waves. The number of waves which pass a given point in one second is called the frequency of that system of waves. A system of light-waves of definite frequency corresponds to a definite colour in the spectrum. Now a molecule, when excited, vibrates with a certain number of definite frequencies. In other words, there are a…
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
States what Arthur Eddington is; the author is tied to Arthur Eddington in the knowledge graph.
There are, to begin with, certain reasons for thinking that the total amount of matter in the universe is limited. If this were not the case, the gravitational effects of enormously distant matter would make the kind of world in which we live impossible. We must therefore suppose that there is some definite number of electrons and protons in the world: theoretically, a complete census would be possible. These are…
Bertrand Russell, The A B C of Relativity
The author is tied to Arthur Eddington in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Arthur Eddington
- Karl Popper
- Alfred North Whitehead
- Galen Strawson
- Paul Feyerabend
- Philip Goff (philosopher)
- Charles De Koninck
Related ideas
- General relativity
- Idealism
- Royal Medal
- Logical positivism
- Metaphysics
- Group (mathematics)
- Quantum
- Numerology
- Ontology
- Physics
- Newton's law of universal gravitation
- Quantum mechanics
- Star
- Special relativity
- Short story
- American Philosophical Society
- Spacetime
- Arrow of time
- Time (magazine)
- Trinity College, Cambridge
- Uncertainty principle
- Gifford Lectures
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Astrophysics
Place in the tradition
Part of Confirmation holism.