Word: eddington
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...could be that the googol's emergence marked the time when mankind's fascination with indigestible numbers slipped beyond the pale. In the same decade that the googol appeared, Sir Arthur Eddington opened his absolutely serious book, The Philosophy of Physical Science, with the sentence: "I believe there are 15,747,724,136,275,002,577,605,653,961,181,555,468,044,717,914,527,116,709,366,231,425,076,185,631,031,296 pro tons in the universe and the same number of electrons...
...could astronomers photograph a star nearly in line with the sun when it would certainly be obscured by sunlight? Answer: during a total eclipse. On May 29, 1919, during an eclipse expedition to the island of Principe off the West African coast, the British astronomer Arthur Eddington found deflections in starlight that almost matched Einstein's prediction. Later, when Einstein was asked what he would have concluded if no bending had been detected, he replied: "Then I would have been sorry for the dear Lord?the theory is correct...
...given tumultuous welcomes by throngs from Tokyo to Manhattan. Popular books were written to explain the mysteries of relativity. Still, the theory was difficult, its mathematics decipherable by only a tiny part of the scientific priesthood. Asked if it were true that only three people understood the subject, Eddington jokingly countered, "I'm trying to think who the third person...
Surely, replied the illustrious British astronomer and physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, nature would forbid such a reductio ad absurdum as a star so compressed that sit does not shine. But two other astronomers, Mount Wilson Observatory's Fritz Zwicky and Walter Baade, were more intellectually adventurous...
...Eddington's quote recalls, through a single, coherent image, the entire enterprise in which Western philosophical discourse and literature have been involved since Descartes: the mapping of consciousness. And it is the reader who locates this inheritance, identifies the "tiny specks floating in a void" as truths, and jots them down. This could be interpreted. I suppose, as a variation on Benjamin's idea that a work should be written composed of quotations; except that no thought of "composing a work" ever occurs to the reader. Rather, quotations are the material out of which he constructs a mosaic depicting...