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There Is Only One Law Of Nature-the Second Law Of Thermodynamics-which Recognises A Distinction Between Past And Future More Profound Than The Difference Of Plus And Minus. It Stands Aloof From All The Rest. ... It Opens Up A New Province Of Knowledge, Namely, The Study Of Organisation; And It Is In Connection With Organisation That A Direction Of Time-flow And A Distinction Between Doing And Undoing Appears For The First Time.

-Arthur Eddington

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There Is Only One

Arthur Eddington

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There Is Only One Law Of Nature-the Second Law Of Thermodynamics-which Recognises A Distinction Between Past And Future More Profound Than The Difference Of Plus And Minus. It Stands Aloof From All The Rest. ... It Opens Up A New Province Of Knowledge, Namely, The Study Of Organisation; And It Is In Connection With Organisation That A Direction Of Time-flow And A Distinction Between Doing And Undoing Appears For The First Time.

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If An Army Of Monkeys Were Strumming On Typewriters, They Might Write All The Books In The British Museum.

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We Have Found That Where Science Has Progressed The Farthest, The Mind Has But Regained From Nature That Which The Mind Put Into Nature.

Do Not Put Too Much Confidence In Experimental Results Until They Have Been Confirmed By Theory.

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It Is Impossible To Trap Modern Physics Into Predicting Anything With Perfect Determinism Because It Deals With Probabilities From The Outset.

What Is Possible In The Cavendish Laboratory May Not Be Too Difficult In The Sun.

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.

If I Let My Fingers Wander Idly Over The Keys Of A Typewriter It Might Happen That My Screed Made An Intelligible Sentence. If An Army Of Monkeys Were Strumming On Typewriters They Might Write All The Books In The British Museum. The Chance Of Their Doing So Is Decidedly More Favourable Than The Chance Of The Molecules Returning To One Half Of The Vessel.

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Our Model Of Nature Should Not Be Like A Building-a Handsome Structure For The Populace To Admire, Until In The Course Of Time Some One Takes Away A Corner Stone And The Edifice Comes Toppling Down. It Should Be Like An Engine With Movable Parts. We Need Not Fix The Position Of Any One Lever; That Is To Be Adjusted From Time To Time As The Latest Observations Indicate. The Aim Of The Theorist Is To Know The Train Of Wheels Which The Lever Sets In Motion-that Binding Of The Parts Which Is The Soul Of The Engine.

If Your Theory Is Found To Be Against The Second Law Of Thermodynamics I Give You No Hope; There Is Nothing For It But To Collapse In Deepest Humiliation.

The Electron, As It Leaves The Atom, Crystallises Out Of Schrodinger's Mist Like A Genie Emerging From His Bottle.

The Word Reality Frightens Me.

There Once Was A Brainy Baboon, Who Always Breathed Down A Bassoon, For He Said, It Appears That In Billions Of Years I Shall Certainly Hit On A Tune.

It Is One Thing For The Human Mind To Extract From The Phenomena Of Nature The Laws Which It Has Itself Put Into Them; It May Be A Far Harder Thing To Extract Laws Over Which It Has No Control. It Is Even Possible That Laws Which Have Not Their Origin In The Mind May Be Irrational, And We Can Never Succeed In Formulating Them.

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.

Oh Leave The Wise Our Measures To Collate. One Thing At Least Is Certain, Light Has Weight. One Thing Is Certain And The Rest Debate. Light Rays, When Near The Sun, Do Not Go Straight.

There Is No Space Without Aether, And No Aether Which Does Not Occupy Space.

In Any Attempt To Bridge The Domains Of Experience Belonging To The Spiritual And Physical Sides Of Nature, Time Occupies The Key Position.

Whether In The Intellectual Pursuits Of Science Or In The Mystical Pursuits Of The Spirit, The Light Beckons Ahead, And The Purpose Surging In Our Nature Responds.

Who Will Observe The Observers?

It Is A Primitive Form Of Thought That Things Exist Or Do Not Exist.

Time Is The Supreme Law Of Nature.

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We Are Bits Of Stellar Matter That Got Cold By Accident, Bits Of A Star Gone Wrong.

Science Is One Thing, Wisdom Is Another. Science Is An Edged Tool, With Which Men Play Like Children, And Cut Their Own Fingers. If You Look At The Results Which Science Has Brought In Its Train, You Will Find Them To Consist Almost Wholly In Elements Of Mischief. See How Much Belongs To The Word "explosion" Alone, Of Which The Ancients Knew Nothing.

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When An Investigator Has Developed A Formula Which Gives A Complete Representation Of The Phenomena Within A Certain Range, He May Be Prone To Satisfaction. Would It Not Be Wiser If He Should Say 'foiled Again! I Can Find Out No More About Nature Along This Line.'

Whatever Else There May Be In Our Nature, Responsibility Toward Truth Is One Of Its Attributes.

The Idea Of A Universal Mind Or Logos Would Be, I Think, A Fairly Plausible Inference From The Present State Of Scientific Theory.

Every Body Continues In Its State Of Rest Or Uniform Motion In A Straight Line, Except Insofar As It Doesn't.

In The World Of Physics We Watch A Shadowgraph Performance Of The Drama Of Familiar Life. The Shadow Of My Elbow Rests On The Shadow Table As The Shadow Ink Flows Over The Shadow Paper. It Is All Symbolic, And As A Symbol The Physicist Leaves It. ... The Frank Realisation That Physical Science Is Concerned With A World Of Shadows Is One Of The Most Significant Of Recent Advances.

Events Do Not Happen; They Are Just There, And We Come Across Them.

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'.

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.

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In The Most Modern Theories Of Physics Probability Seems To Have Replaced Aether As "the Nominative Of The Verb 'to Undulate'."

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The Quest Of The Absolute Leads Into The Four-dimensional World.

The Understanding Between A Non-technical Writer And His Reader Is That He Shall Talk More Or Less Like A Human Being And Not Like An Act Of Parliament. I Take It That The Aim Of Such Books Must Be To Convey Exact Thought In Inexact Language... He Can Never Succeed Without The Co-operation Of The Reader.

I Am Aware That Many Critics Consider The Conditions In The Stars Not Sufficiently Extreme . . . The Stars Are Not Hot Enough. The Critics Lay Themselves Open To An Obvious Retort: We Tell Them To Go And Find A Hotter Place.

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Philosophically, The Notion Of A Beginning Of The Present Order Of Nature Is Repugnant To Me ... I Should Like To Find A Genuine Loophole.

I Don't Believe Any Experiment Until It Is Confirmed By Theory. I Find This Is A Witty Inversion Of "conventional" Wisdom.

A Hundred Thousand Million Stars Make One Galaxy; A Hundred Thousand Million Galaxies Make One Universe. The Figures May Not Be Very Trustworthy, But I Think They Give A Correct Impression.

Don't Believe The Results Of Experiments Until They're Confirmed By Theory.

What We Makes Of The World Must Be Largely Dependent On The Sense-organs That We Happen To Possess. How The World Must Have Changed Since The Man Came To Rely On His Eyes Rather Than His Nose.

Man Is Slightly Nearer To The Atom Than To The Star. ... From His Central Position Man Can Survey The Grandest Works Of Nature With The Astronomer, Or The Minutest Works With The Physicist. ... [k]nowledge Of The Stars Leads Through The Atom; And Important Knowledge Of The Atom Has Been Reached Through The Stars.

The Helium Which We Handle Must Have Been Put Together At Some Time And Some Place. We Do Not Argue With The Critic Who Urges That The Stars Are Not Hot Enough For This Process; We Tell Him To Go And Find A Hotter Place.

Never Accept A Fact Until It Has Been Verified By Theory.

An Ocean Traveler Has Even More Vividly The Impression That The Ocean Is Made Of Waves Than That It Is Made Of Water.

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Schrödinger's Wave-mechanics Is Not A Physical Theory, But A Dodge - And A Very Good Dodge Too.

Asked In 1919 Whether It Was True That Only Three People In The World Understood The Theory Of General Relativity, [eddington] Allegedly Replied: "who's The Third?"

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.

Something Unknown Is Doing We Don't Know What-that Is What Our Theory Amounts To.

Observation And Theory Get On Best When They Are Mixed Together, Both Helping One Another In The Pursuit Of Truth. It Is A Good Rule Not To Put Overmuch Confidence In A Theory Until It Has Been Confirmed By Observation. I Hope I Shall Not Shock The Experimental Physicists Too Much If I Add That It Is Also A Good Rule Not To Put Overmuch Confidence In The Observational Results That Are Put Forward Until They Have Been Confirmed By Theory.

We Have Found That Where Science Has Progressed The Farthest, The Mind Has But Regained From Nature That Which The Mind Has Put Into Nature. We Have Found A Strange Foot-print On The Shores Of The Unknown. We Have Devised Profound Theories, One After Another, To Account For Its Origin. At Last, We Have Succeeded In Reconstructing The Creature That Made The Foot-print. And Lo! It Is Our Own.

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