“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.”
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
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Arthur Stanley Eddington 105
British astrophysicist 1882–1944Related quotes
from On the Method of Theoretical Physics, p. 183. The Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford (10 June 1933). Quoted in Einstein's Philosophy of Science http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/
1930s
Context: Our experience hitherto justifies us in trusting that nature is the realization of the simplest that is mathematically conceivable. I am convinced that purely mathematical construction enables us to find those concepts and those lawlike connections between them that provide the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Useful mathematical concepts may well be suggested by experience, but in no way can they be derived from it. Experience naturally remains the sole criterion of the usefulness of a mathematical construction for physics. But the actual creative principle lies in mathematics. Thus, in a certain sense, I take it to be true that pure thought can grasp the real, as the ancients had dreamed.
Source: The Fabric of Reality (1997), Ch.3
Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 6: Conclusion, p 95
Source: Christianizing the Social Order (1912), p. 104
Source: Science and the Unseen World (1929), Ch. VIII, p.82
§ 2.
Linear Associative Algebra (1882)
Context: The branches of mathematics are as various as the sciences to which they belong, and each subject of physical enquiry has its appropriate mathematics. In every form of material manifestation, there is a corresponding form of human thought, so that the human mind is as wide in its range of thought as the physical universe in which it thinks.
Science and the Unseen World (1929), III, p.33