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An electron is no more (and no less) hypothetical than a star. Nowadays we count electrons one by one in a Geiger counter, as we count the stars one by one on a photographic plate.

Arthur Eddington

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Arthur Eddington
Age: 61 †
Born: 1882
Born: December 28
Died: 1944
Died: November 22
Astronomer
Astrophysicist
Philosopher
Physicist
Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington
Sir Arthur Eddington
Stars
Photographic
Less
Plate
Science
Counter
Plates
Hypothesis
Nowadays
Electron
Count
Hypothetical
Star
Electrons

More quotes by Arthur Eddington

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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.
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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.
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It is a primitive form of thought that things exist or do not exist.
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Events do not happen they are just there, and we come across them.
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The mathematics is not there till we put it there.
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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?
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Shuffling is the only thing which Nature cannot undo.
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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.
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Something unknown is doing we don't know what-that is what our theory amounts to.
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We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.
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Do not put too much confidence in experimental results until they have been confirmed by theory.
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It is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they are confirmed by theory.
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In any attempt to bridge the domains of experience belonging to the spiritual and physical sides of nature, time occupies the key position.
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The quest of the absolute leads into the four-dimensional world.
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For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal.
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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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What is possible in the Cavendish Laboratory may not be too difficult in the sun.
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You cannot disturb the tiniest petal of a flower without the troubling of a distant star.
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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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But it is necessary to insist more strongly than usual that what I am putting before you is a model-the Bohr model atom-because later I shall take you to a profounder level of representation in which the electron instead of being confined to a particular locality is distributed in a sort of probability haze all over the atom.
Arthur Eddington