Thesis ID: CBB001562117

Practical Mystic: Religion and Science in the Life and Work of A. S. Eddington (2004)

unapi

Stanley, Matthew (Author)


Harvard University
Galison, Peter


Publication Date: 2004
Edition Details: Advisor: Galison, Peter
Physical Details: 397 pp.
Language: English

This thesis examines the problem of the relationship between science and religion through a close study of the life and work of the Quaker astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944). The argument is made that the interaction between religion and science should be studied through the individual scientist and how his/her values can move between those categories. Values that provide this sort of bridging function are categorized as "valence values." Eddington is used as an example of a scientist whose valence values were crucial to both his religious and scientific life. This dissertation is structured around major events or periods in Eddington's life in which the presence of religious values were salient, ranging over the course of his entire career and encompassing all the fields in which he was an important figure: relativity, astrophysics, science popularization, and philosophy. Eddington's activities during World War I are examined in the context of his pacifist and internationalist values. His struggle as a conscientious objector against conscription is juxtaposed with the political location of British scientists during the war. His work on the 1919 eclipse expedition, intended to confirm Einstein's theory of general relativity, made him an icon of science but was heavily dependent on his internationalist religious views. To understand the expedition properly we must examine what it meant for a British scientist to support a German theory in the middle of war and to see that the expedition emerged out of a complex social web of religion, politics, and science. Similarly, Eddington's Quaker mysticism shaped his interpretation of relativity and quantum mechanics. He argued that the new physics' positivism actually supported religious experience. In his popularizations, he explicitly positioned his ideas on religion and determinism to refute the growing body of anti-religion Marxist scientific thought in Britain. Eddington's mystical outlook was also fundamental for his technical work, where he applied the Quaker idea of open-ended seeking for spiritual truth to his pioneering work in astrophysics. At a time when a strict adherence to deductive principles of physics had proved unable to understand stellar constitution, Eddington argued that (as in Quaker mysticism) an outlook less concerned with certainty, and more concerned with further exploration would be productive in uncertain subjects like astrophysics.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 65/05 (2004): 1937. UMI pub. no. 3131997.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001562117/

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Authors & Contributors
Stanley, Matthew
Cantor, Geoffrey N.
Batten, Alan H.
Enrico Peroli
Wootton, David
Sponsel, Alistair William
Concepts
Science and religion
Astronomy
Biographies
Quakers and Quakerism
Physics
Cosmology
Time Periods
20th century, early
17th century
16th century
20th century
19th century
Renaissance
Places
Great Britain
Portugal
Italy
Germany
Europe
Institutions
Royal Observatory Greenwich
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