Science: Death of Eddington

One of mankind’s most reassuring cosmic thinkers died last week. Death came at 61 to cool, unruffled Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, Cambridge University astronomer, in a Cambridge nursing home.

To scientists, Sir Arthur was affectionately known as the senior partner in the firm of “Eddington & [Sir James] Jeans, Interpreters of the Universe.” Shy, neat, reed-nosed Sir Arthur looked precisely like the British university don he was, and he discoursed on his cosmic subject with a wit and clarity rare among scientists. He set down in brook-clear language a masterly simplification of Einstein’s theory of relativity, spent most of his life explaining the enigmas of abstract science for the benefit of laymen (The Nature of the Physical World, The Expanding Universe). He enlivened these lessons with attempts to calculate such incalculables as the heat of the sun (ten to 25 million degrees centigrade), the number of subatomic particles in the universe (the figure 3 followed by 79 digits), the universe’s age (five billion years).

But Sir Arthur, a devout Quaker, lifelong teetotaler and bachelor, more philosopher than scientist, devoted his speculations mostly to the borderland between science and religion. Interested in the questions that science could not answer, he once remarked: “What do we really observe? Relativity theory has returned one answer—we only observe relations. Quantum theory returns another answer—we only observe probabilities.”

To nose-grinding laymen, Eddington’s vast conceptions were somehow vastly comforting. He once predicted that the expanding universe, “this ball of radio waves,” would end in “one stupendous broadcast,” but gave assurance that this event would not take place for perhaps 90 billion years. As for man, Eddington dismissed him as “one of the gruesome results” of a cosmic accident by which “some lumps of matter of the wrong size have occasionally been formed.”