Weird Eddington Quotes

Arthur Eddington, physicist and mathematician, wrote:

“The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness”

He also wrote:

“It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference.”

Both of these are in his book The Nature of the Physical World, published in 1928. 

Eddington made his name in astronomy and especially by traipsing off to Príncipe in 1919 to attempt to measure the bending of light around the sun predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. The island is inside the underarm of Africa, and the eclipse occurred on May 29th. At only 1.5° N of the equator it was probably miserable at the time, especially wearing the heaps of clothing expected of English men back then. Eddington said he had confirmed Einstein's prediction, which made Einstein famous. I once read that Eddington cherry picked his data, but Wikipedia says 

The results were argued by some to have been plagued by systematic error and possibly confirmation bias, although modern reanalysis of the dataset suggests that Eddington's analysis was accurate.

Maybe he just got lucky or had a sixth sense for his experiment. Maybe he knew what he was doing.

Anyway, back to these quotes. Eddington didn't accomplish much in the field of physics or the new quantum mechanics, as far as I know, but he did have a few crazy ideas. He claimed the number of hydrogen atoms in the universe was exactly 136*2²⁵⁶, approximately 1.57e79.

The "136" looks suspicious.... Eddington claimed the fine structure constant α was 1/136, which was about the value being measured back then. But better measurements found it to be a little less than 1/137, so Eddington cooked up a way to find one more degree of freedom, thus 136+1=137. For this he was ridiculed and some people started calling him "Arthur Adding-one," and the episode detracted from his scientific credibility.

 
So back to these quotes, made as the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics were being established by Born and Heisenberg and Pauli and a bunch of guys at Göttingen in Germany. Eddington must have been impressed with QM and it triggered his curiosity but didn't get into the meat of it so played around at the [far] edges. 

Anyway, back to the quotes. They seem influenced by QM, but they're really quite astonishing and, well, kooky for any actual scientist to say. Nothing was known about consciousness back then, just as nothing about it is known today. To say that there is no external world and it all springs from consciousness is way, way, way out there, too soon even for science fiction, which was then sending goofy rockets to be planted into the lunar surface and there were canals on Mars built by Martians (first described in 1877). Eddington said it all depends on "mental character." 

Eddington took the red pill. He believed that consciousness could not be explained by physics. (Then by what?) I knew about the eclipse of course, and his adding one to 136 to get 137, but I never knew he was this far out there. He was probably a fascinating guy to have a conversation with, in front of a large fireplace with port and cigars, and I suspect he had even weirder ideas than he wrote about. He would certainly be worth a time travel trip, when they finally figure out time travel and built the necessary infrastructure. I don't know, depends on the cost. If Einstein would be there at the same time, I'd pay a lot for that ticket. Just might stay, too.