Sir Arthur Eddington, O.M.

SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON, O.M. A. VIBERT DOUGLAS WITH the death of Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington in Cambridge on November 21, 1944, a very great man has passed through the portals into the unseen world. Born in Kendal in 1882, he was the son of the Headmaster of Stramongate School. From Owens College, that famous training ground of potential scholars, he proceeded to Cambridge~ Here he trod the courts and corridors where the spirit of Newton lingers, where brilliant mathematicians had been 'or were making advances in pure mathematics and in its applications to physical problems and to astronomy---":'Airy, Cayley, Stokes, John Couch Adams, Larmor, J. J. Thomson, George Darwin. In 1904 he won the distinction of Senior Wrangler and in 1907 became Smith's Prizeman and Fellow of Trinity. As Chief Assistant at Greenwich Observatory from about that time until 1913, Eddington rose to prominence with his investigations of stellar movements and the structure of the universe, which formed the subject m'atter,and title of his first book, published in 1914. In this year he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in the previous year, at the age of thirty, he was elected Plumian P~ofessor of Astronomy in the University of Cambridge. This chair and the directorship of the Observatory he held with steadily increasing honour alld international recognition to the end of his life. In memory I see him in his classroom off Bene't Street. ,From my seat beneath the tablet to Cayley and Stokes, I watch a master-mind at work. A slight man of average height, in academic gown, reserved almost to the point of shyness, he rarely looks at his class. His keen eyes look I at or through the side wall as he half t-urns from the blackboard and seems to think aloud the significance of the tensors which he has just written on the board. The mathematical theory of relativity is developed ab initio before our eyes and the symbols are made to live and take on meaning. -I see his face in profile and hear his low voice as he says as though in soliloquy: tiThe real three-dimensional world is 0 bsolete, and must be replaced by the four-dimensional space-time with non-Euclidean properties. . .. But the four-dimensional world is no mere illustration; it i~ the real world of physics, arrived at in the recognized way by which physics has always (rightly or wrongly) sought for reality." One must remember that this was 1922. Einstein's general theory had only been known in England for some five years and very few had the mathematical knowledge to read it; de Sitter's and Weyl's contributions were as yet scarcely understood; and Eddington's Report on the Relativity Theory oj Gravitation for the Physical Society of London and his less mathematical Space, Time and Gravitation were not 233 234 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY two years old. The thrill of seeing physical science on the march in a new, direction, the sense of something stirring, of new adventu're, held us tensely expectant even though we might but half comprehend it; and before us slowly, deliberately, quietly, alternately thinking aloud in symbols and in words, was one of the few mOen, one of perhaps a dozen men, who at that time had the insight and vision to see whither it was leading. , The scene changes to the Cavendish Laboratory where Sir Ernest Rutherford is presiding at a meeting of the Cavendish Society and Professor Eddington is the speaker. In his usual quiet, reaso~ed, restrained manner he has given an exposition of his recent theoretical work on electron capture in giant stars. Again one must remember that this is 1922 and physicists' are not very familiar with the behaviour oJ matter at temperatures ranging from 3000°C. to several million degrees, nor with the opacity resulting from extremely high ionization. Questions are put to the speaker like rapid rapier thrusts, and quietly parried. Then Rutherford rises with lust for battle in his eyes and as with a mighty broadsword delivers what he obviously thinks is a final deadly blow. Fire suddenly springs...