2014 | ASIN : B00IMJCXBA | English | Author(s): Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington | EPUB | 1,5 MB

This is an illustrated version of a first-rate classic of physics and philosophy, with a carefully prepared clickable table of contents and clickable page references. THE ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS ARE INCLUDED. We have also included a number of  pointing out the ways in which philosophical and physical ideas in this book directly influenced Golden Age science fiction.
In his heyday between the two World Wars, Arthur Stanley Eddington was one of the first superstars of modern science, and his popular works were immensely successful and had a very wide sale. This was probably his most successful book of all. Eddington was the first English mathematician to understand General Relativity and to assimilate its ideas into his very bones, and here he gives a popular explanation that has never been surpassed in clearness. Then he proceeds to describing the ideas of modern quantum theory, which was developing rapidly even as he wrote. This book is a brilliant yet simple description of the efflorescence of theoretical physics in the revolutionary first three decades of the twentieth century, from the point of view of an insider. Eddington only uses two mathematical equations, one of which is "0=0".
But this book covers a much wider field than only science. Eddington was a committed Quaker, and his gentle yet radical religious philosophy illuminated his entire life and outlook. His religious beliefs were strengthened, not weakened, by his scientific career, and he synthesized science and religion in a unique manner, based upon his own idiosyncratic epistemological standpoint. He would certainly have received the Templeton Prize today.
Eddington described his philosophy of the world as a blend of "Selective Subjectivism" and "Structuralism". He came to the opinion that (in a manner of speaking) what most of us call "objective" is really subjective, and vice versa. And he claimed to "find no disharmony between a philosophy which embraces the wider significance of human experience and the specialized philosophy of physical science, even though the latter relates to a system of thought of recent growth whose stability is yet to be tested."
The book is written in beautiful and mellifluous English that is an example for the present day. [We have preserved the English spellings for authenticity.]
Tidbits:
"We do not ask how mass gets a grip on space-time and causes the curvature which our theory postulates. The mass is the curvature. The conception of matter, which we associate with these regions of unusual contortion, is a monument erected by the mind to mark the scene of conflict. When you visit the site of a battle, do you ever ask how the monument that commemorates it can have caused so much carnage?"
"'The succession of feelings which constitutes a man's consciousness is the reality which produces in our minds the perception of the motions of his brain."
"If the scientist were to repent and admit that it was necessary to include among the agents controlling the stars and the electrons an omnipresent spirit to whom we trace the sacred things of consciousness, we should suspect an intention to reduce God to a system of differential equations."
"The direction of time's arrow could only be determined by that incongruous mixture of theology and statistics known as the second law of thermodynamics. If physics cannot determine which way up its own world ought to be regarded, there is not much hope of guidance from it as to ethical orientation. We trust to some inward sense of fitness when we orient the physical world with the future on top, and likewise we must trust to some inner monitor when we orient the spiritual world with the good on top."
"I think that the 'success' theory of reasoning will not be much appreciated by the pure mathematician. Let the external world behave as irrationally as it will, there will remain undisturbed a corner of knowledge where he may happily hunt for the roots of the Riemann-Zeta function."
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