Arthur Eddington

Arthur Eddington was the Cambridge astronomer who led the 1919 eclipse expedition that confirmed Einstein’s bending of starlight and made relativity famous, and who worked out the internal constitution of the stars. A Quaker and conscientious objector, he was also the best popular expositor of the new physics, and The Expanding Universe of 1933 explains Hubble’s discovery and Lemaître’s cosmology to a general reader. His later attempt to derive the constants of nature from pure thought convinced no one. Asked whether it was true that only three people understood relativity, he is said to have wondered who the third was.