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Science and the Unseen World QUOTES

Science and the Unseen World QUOTES

1 " You will understand the true spirit neither of science nor of religion unless seeking is placed in the forefront. "

― Arthur Stanley Eddington , Science and the Unseen World

2 " We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness - the one centre where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations than those conditioned by the world of symbols... Physics most strongly insists that its methods do not penetrate behind the symbolism. Surely then that mental and spiritual nature of ourselves, known in our minds by an intimate contact transcending the methods of physics, supplies just that... which science is admittedly unable to give. "

― Arthur Stanley Eddington , Science and the Unseen World

3 " Consciousness is not wholly, nor even primarily a device for receiving sense-impressions. "

― Arthur Stanley Eddington , Science and the Unseen World

4 " The chairs and tables around us which broadcast to us incessantly those signals which affect our sight and touch cannot in their nature be like unto the signals or to the sensations which the signals awake at the end of their journey. "

― Arthur Stanley Eddington , Science and the Unseen World

5 " It is an astonishing feat of deciphering that we should have been able to infer an orderly scheme of natural knowledge from such indirect communication. "

― Arthur Stanley Eddington , Science and the Unseen World

6 " If in a community of the blind one man suddenly received the gift of sight, he would have much to tell which would not be at all scientific. "

― Arthur Stanley Eddington , Science and the Unseen World

7 " If to-day you ask a physicist what he has finally made out the æther or the electron to be, the answer will not be a description in terms of billiard balls or fly-wheels or anything concrete; he will point instead to a number of symbols and a set of mathematical equations which they satisfy. What do the symbols stand for? The mysterious reply is given that physics is indifferent to that; it has no means of probing beneath the symbolism. To understand the phenomena of the physical world it is necessary to know the equations which the symbols obey but not the nature of that which is being symbolised. "

― Arthur Stanley Eddington , Science and the Unseen World

8 " Physics most strongly insists that its methods do not penetrate behind the symbolism. "

― Arthur Stanley Eddington , Science and the Unseen World