Arthur Stanley Eddington: Quotes about nature

Science and the Unseen World (1929)
Context: 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.... this newer outlook has modified the challenge from the material to the spiritual world.<!--III, p.30

Einstein's special theory of relativity, which explains the indeterminateness of the frame of space and time, crowns the work of Copernicus who first led us to give up our insistence on a geocentric outlook on nature; Einstein's general theory of relativity, which reveals the curvature or non-Euclidean geometry of space and time, carries forward the rudimentary thought of those earlier astronomers who first contemplated the possibility that their existence lay on something which was not flat. These earlier revolutions are still a source of perplexity in childhood, which we soon outgrow; and a time will come when Einstein's amazing revelations have likewise sunk into the commonplaces of educated thought.
The Theory of Relativity and its Influence on Scientific Thought (1922), p. 31-32

Science and the Unseen World (1929)
Context: Our story of evolution ended with a stirring in the brain-organ of the latest of Nature's experiments; but that stirring of consciousness transmutes the whole story and gives meaning to its symbolism. Symbolically it is the end, but looking behind the symbolism it is the beginning.<!--III, p.38

Science and the Unseen World (1929)
Context: It remains a real world if there is a background to the symbols—an unknown quantity which the mathematical symbol x stands for. We think we are not wholly cut off from this background. It is to this background that our own personality and consciousness belong, and those spiritual aspects of our nature not to be described by any symbolism... to which mathematical physics has hitherto restricted itself.<!--III, p.37-38

Science and the Unseen World (1929), III, p.33

Science and the Unseen World (1929), IV, p.47

Source: The Nature of the Physical World

Source: Science and the Unseen World (1929), Ch. IV, p.42-43

"A Generalization of Weyl's Theory of the Electromagnetic and Gravitational Fields" in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A99 (1921), p. 108

III, p.33
Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Source: The Nature of the Physical World (1928), Ch. 4 The Running-Down of the Universe

III, p.36
Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Source: Science and the Unseen World (1929), Ch. V, p.53

The Nature of the Physical World (1928)

That is an excellent description of Pure Mathematics, which has already been given by an eminent mathematician <nowiki>[</nowiki>Bertrand Russell<nowiki>]</nowiki>.
Space, Time and Gravitation (1920)

III, p.34
Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Source: The Nature of the Physical World (1928), Ch. 4 The Running-Down of the Universe

Source: The Nature of the Physical World (1928), Ch. 13 Reality