Arthur Eddington Quotes
There was a time when we wanted to be told what an electron is. The question was never answered. No familiar conceptions can be woven around the electron; it belongs to the waiting list.
Eddington, Arthur S. The Nature of the Physical World. Macmillan, 1928, p. 271.
Born was a refugee who escaped to England from Nazi Germany.
This quotation illustrates a facet of science that often affects politics. At the time there had been much new information that tended to give more and more support to the notion of the atom. Most physics were by then convinced that there were atoms and that they seemed to behave just like Newton’s laws predicted that all bodies would. Mach however, would not even accept the fact that atoms really existed. He was not just any scientist but one of the better and more prestigious physicists in the world. New ideas are rarely accepted by all, even in the scientific disciplines. In the late 20th century scientific evidence began to be amassed indicating that there was global warming and a significant part of it was man made. As the data kept accumulating and the results of studies were understood, the vast majority of scientists became convinced about global warming. But there were a few who did not think that there was yet sufficient evidence to reach that conclusion, just as Mach was in 1897 convinced that there the atoms existence had not been demonstrated and in his judgment he did not think that atoms were a reasonable explanation of the physical world. But the fact that he had not yet become convinced should be examined by policy makers and juxtaposed against the reasons and the evidence by the other scientists. He might have been right; however he was not. The global warming nay sayers might be right, but with each passing day, the likelihood becomes less as more evidence is aggregated and analyzed.
The Higgs Boson was a fundamental particle of physics which controls much of what gives everything mass. At the time he coined the term, no one had ever seen or proved that a Higgs Boson even existed and he was trying to explain why searching for it was so important. The particle was proved to exist with the Super Hadron Collider in 2012. However scientists had some mathematical calculations that show that there should be 5 different Higgs Bosons. The search continued.
Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington OM FRS was an English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician. He was also a philosopher of science and a populariser of science. 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.
