Sir Arthur Eddington Biography
This short life of Sir Arthur Eddington outlines his main intellectual achievements.
Sir Arthur Eddington is perhaps best known as a supporter of Einstein's general theory of relativity. His book The Mathematical Theory of Relativity was praised by Einstein as 'the finest presentation of the subject in any language'.
Another renowned expert on general relativity, Ludwig Silberstein, said to Sir Arthur Eddington, "You must be one of three persons in the world who understands general relativity." Eddington mused silently for a few moments before replying, "I am trying to think who the third one is."
On 29 May 1919 Eddington was on the island of Principia off the coast of Equatorial Guinea in West Africa. He was observing an eclipse of the Sun in the hope of proving the correctness of Einstein's general theory of relativity. He did this by observing how the light from a star passing close to the Sun was deflected by gravity. Newton's theory of gravitation predicted a defection, but Einstein's theory predicted a deflection of twice the magnitude predicted by Newton's theory.
The weather was far from perfect and Sir Arthur Eddington's team could only get one photographic plate of scientific significance, but it was enough. His book Space, Time and Gravitation describe the precise experiment and his conclusion, "the results from this plate gave a definite displacement in good accordance with Einstein's theory and disagreeing with the Newtonian predication".
Eddington was a great supporter of Albert Einstein, and backed Einstein's model of cosmology until Edwin Hubble's observations of galactic redshifts in 1929. In 1930 Eddington published a letter in Nature praising George Lemaître's model of cosmology because it explained why the universe was expanding, but felt philosophical repugnance" about the Universe having a beginning.
Eddington's Big Bang model was a Slow Bang, which put the creation event infinitely distant in past time. He thought of the Universe as "beginning to evolve infinitely slowly from a primitive uniform distribution in unstable equilibrium," (quoted in Big Bang by Simon Singh, p.281). But what does it mean to evolve "infinitely slowly" from an event that happened an infinite time ago? How can you traverse an infinite amount of time to get where we are? Kant's paralogisms loom.
Further reading
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking contain further accounts of Sir Arthur Eddington's work on Einstein's general theory of relativity and cosmology.