Justice & Law Quote by Arthur Eddington

Eddington isn’t just defending a physics principle here; he’s policing scientific ambition with a relish that borders on theatrical. By invoking “deepest humiliation,” he frames the second law not as a technical constraint but as a kind of cosmic etiquette: you can be brilliant, original, even revolutionary, but you don’t get to rewrite the bill of thermodynamic rights.

The intent is disciplinary. Early 20th-century physics was a carnival of new frameworks - relativity, quantum theory, statistical mechanics - and plenty of speculative overreach. Eddington, a key interpreter of Einstein for the English-speaking world, understood how seductive grand theories can be. This line draws a bright boundary between productive heresy and nonsense. Many scientific laws are provisional; the second law feels different because it is simultaneously empirical and statistical, grounded in everyday irreversibility (heat flows, eggs scramble) yet elevated into a near-metaphysical arrow of time. Eddington leans into that aura.

The subtext is a warning about rhetorical shortcuts. A theory can be mathematically elegant and still be physically unserious if it implies a perpetual motion machine in a new costume. “No hope” is less literal than cultural: you won’t just be wrong; you’ll be laughed out of the room by the one constraint nature seems to enforce with special cruelty.

What makes it work is the blend of scientific authority and moral language. He turns entropy into a character witness, the one juror who never gets swayed, and dares theorists to face the verdict.