{"id":1573,"date":"2012-03-22T08:42:07","date_gmt":"2012-03-22T08:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=1573"},"modified":"2012-03-22T08:42:07","modified_gmt":"2012-03-22T08:42:07","slug":"as-a-rule-he-was-curiously-uncritical-about-his-own-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2012\/03\/22\/as-a-rule-he-was-curiously-uncritical-about-his-own-ideas\/","title":{"rendered":"\"... as a rule he was curiously uncritical about his own ideas\""},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It is said that Cambridge astrophysicist,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/scienceworld.wolfram.com\/biography\/Eddington.html\">Arthur Eddington<\/a> thought that, in the early 1920s, there were only two people who really understood relativity: Einstein \u2013 and Arthur Eddington. \u00a0He held the Plumian <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Plumian_Professor_of_Astronomy_and_Experimental_Philosophy\">Chair<\/a> of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy for over 30 years, yet Einstein was doubtful about some of Eddington's own scholarly abilities, and commented in a letter in 1949 to Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>\"I find that as a rule he was curiously uncritical about his own ideas.\"<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>He is not alone. \u00a0Far too many people lack this curiosity today \u2013 and, sadly, I do not exclude myself from that long list. \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.quotationspage.com\/quotes\/Sir_Arthur_Eddington\/\">Eddington<\/a> was capable of both profound and wacky thought (he's not alone there either); here's one of the former sort, from <em>New Pathways in Science<\/em> (1935):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>\"I hope I shall not shock the experimental physicists too much if I add that it is also a good rule not to put over-much confidence in the observervational results that are put forward until they have been confirmed by theory\"<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Quite so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is said that Cambridge astrophysicist,\u00a0Arthur Eddington thought that, in the early 1920s, there were only two people who really understood relativity: Einstein \u2013 and Arthur Eddington. \u00a0He held the Plumian Chair of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy for over 30...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}