Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944)
Arthur Stanley Eddington was born in Kendal, England, the son of Quaker parents, Arthur Eddington and Sarah Shout. His father had taught at a Quaker training college in Lancashire before moving to Kendal to become headmaster of Stramongate School, where he died of typhoid in 1884. The family moved to Weston-super-Mare where Stanley (as the family always called Arthur junior, to distinguish him from his father) attended Brynmelyn School.
He was fascinated by the stars as a boy; his interest was encouraged by the loan of a three-inch telescope when he was ten. At sixteen, he gained a scholarship to Owens College, Manchester – the forerunner of the University of Manchester. As a student he lived at Dalton Hall, which had been founded by Friends in 1876 to provide accommodation for students of Quaker background and was named after John Dalton, the Quaker physicist and chemist. His progress was rapid, winning him several scholarships, and he graduated with a BSc in physics with First Class Honours in 1902. Based on his performance at Owens College, he was awarded a scholarship to the University of Cambridge (Trinity College) in 1902.
In 1906, Eddington was nominated to the post of chief assistant to the Astronomer Royal at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. He left Cambridge for Greenwich the following month. There he developed a new statistical method for observing stars, which won him the Smith's Prize in 1907; this led to an offer of a fellowship of Trinity College, Cambridge. In December 1912 George Darwin (son of Charles Darwin) died suddenly,and Eddington was promoted to his chair as the Plumian Professor of Astronomy; he was named the director of the Cambridge Observatory the following year.
During World War I Eddington became entangled in controversy. Many scientists felt that all scientific relations between Britain and Germany and her allies should be permanently ended. Eddington’s Quaker principles led him to call for British scientists to preserve their pre-war friendships and co-operation with German scientists. His pacifism caused serious difficulties for him during the war. When conscription was introduced in 1916, he obtained conscientious objector status because of his work. Later the government sought to rescind this registration, but the intervention of the Astronomer Royal kept Eddington out of prison.
At the time Eddington was Secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society, which meant he was the first to receive a series of papers about Einstein’s theory of general relativity. He was to become the chief expositor of relativity in Britain.
It was his expedition to record every moment of the solar eclipse at the African island of Principe on 29 May 1919 that provided conclusive proof of Einstein’s theory of that light is subject to gravitation.
The solar eclipse May, 1919
From The Illustrated London News, November 22nd 1919
As a Quaker, Eddington felt able to link modern physics – relativity and quantum theory – to his faith. He did not expect science to prove religious propositions, but saw no dichotomy between personal religious experience and the new physics. He saw a bond between religious mysticism and the feeling of inspiration often experienced by scientists – the “eureka” moments which sometimes come before a major breakthrough. His views on religion and science were expressed in several publications, most notably in The Nature of the Physical World (1927) and in his Swarthmore lecture of 1929, Science and the Unseen World.
The “Eddington limit”, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars, is named after him.
