Arthur Eddington, Bain News Service photograph (Library of Congress). Source · Public domain
About Arthur Eddington
Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944) was born at Kendal in Westmorland to a Quaker family and educated at Owens College, Manchester, and Trinity College, Cambridge. He became Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge in 1913 and director of the Cambridge Observatory in 1914. A conscientious objector during the First World War, he was among the first in Britain to master Einstein's general relativity, and he led the 1919 eclipse expedition to the island of Principe whose measurements of starlight bending near the Sun were taken as confirming it. His Internal Constitution of the Stars (1926) founded much of modern stellar astrophysics; he was knighted in 1930 and received the Order of Merit in 1938.
The Nature of the Physical World is Arthur Eddington's account, for general readers, of what relativity, thermodynamics and quantum theory had done to the picture of the physical world, and of what that picture leaves room for in human experience. It is substantially the Gifford Lectures he gave at the University of Edinburgh from January to March 1927, published in 1928 by Cambridge University Press and Macmillan.
