Eddington, Arthur (1882-1944) -- from Eric Weisstein's World of Scientific Biography (original) (raw)
English physicist who theoretically investigated stellar interiors. He calculated that the temperature 
at the center of the Sun 
would have to be in the millions of degrees Kelvin, and published the mass-luminosity law for stars in 1924. He also worked out the causes for brightness variations inCepheid variables. On theoretical grounds, he predicted that Betelgeuse would have an angular diameter as large as 0.051 arc seconds.
Eddington was one of the first to appreciate the importance of Einstein's theories ofspecial and general relativity, and published a treatise on the subject. He led an expedition to observed the total solar eclipse of 1919, in which the bending of light rays predicted by general relativity was observed (although it was later shown that the uncertainties were too large to make any definitive statement).
Eddington was arrogant, and in his later years, cooked up pseudoscientific "proofs" on "physical" grounds that thefine structure constant 
was exactly 1/136. When experiments yielded a more accurate value, Eddington produced another proof "proving" that 
. Eddington also disputedChandrasekhar's use of electron degeneracy pressure to derive theChandrasekhar mass limit for a white dwarf, insisting that Chandrasekhar failed to understand the difference between "standing" and "progressing" electron waves.
He devoted the last years of his life to writing popular books, and claimed that the number ofelectrons in the universe is exactly 
, a quantity now known as theEddington number. 
Additional biographies: MacTutor (St. Andrews), Bruce Medalists, Bonn
Eddington, A. S. The Expanding Universe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Eddington, A. S. The Internal Constitution of the Stars. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Eddington, A. S. The Mathematical Theory of Relativity, 3rd ed. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1963.
Eddington, A. S. The Nature of the Physical World. New York: Macmillan, 1928.
Eddington, A. S. Space, Time, and Gravitation: An Outline of the General Relativity Theory. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
© 1996-2007 Eric W. Weisstein