Word: eddington
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...times the attempt comes off, but reading the less successful pieces can be trying. The author's most frequent peccadillo in these pages is a bland humanist sentimentality. He may conclude that a mathematician's work was wrong or that metaphysics taints Eddington's cosmology, and yet refuse to pass adverse judgment on the scientific value of his subject's work. I have in mind particularly his approach to Eddington: "His penchant for paradoxes, his gift for seductive images, his untenable philosophical interpretations of physical events, made him a prime target for clear thinkers." Yet, "he was a major benefactor...
This is not a very subtle way of going about things. I suspect that, had he wished, the author could have written his essay to convince me that Eddington's philosophical misapprehensions were minor flaws in a cosmic vision. Instead he presents a nicely balanced study and then asks us to accept just half...
...would be much more comfortable about judging Eddington with a better idea of what to go on. One can't say much for Newman's own criteria; they are usually obscure, and distressingly inadequate when he spells them out. Of Eddington he concludes, "He deserved to see farther than other men, and time, I suspect, will prove he did." Newman's enthusiasm for the scientist's social contribution has distorted his evaluation of the validity of his scientific work. Eddington, it seems, will prove to be farsighted mostly because he deserved to be farsighted. "His work is graced...
Newman has better criteria, he is keeping them to himself. His treatment of Eddington's cosmology is almost willfully negligent...
Another objection to Eddington's principle is that the so-called constants of nature,--for example, the fine-structure constant, 137--when derived in accordance with his ideas, are "absolutely constant," whereas in several cosmological theories they are represented as increasing decreasing, depending in one way or another on the age of the universe at the time when the are measured...