Eddington, Sir Arthur

Eddington, Sir Arthur Stanley. New Pathways in Science. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. 1959. 

He wrote this in 1925. Eliot s poem, in turn, inspired others. In 1927, the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington said that if entropy was always increasing, then we can know the direction in which time moves by looking at the direction in which it increases. The phrase entropy is the arrow of time gripped the popular imagination, although it is rather meaningless. 

The site http //www-groups. dcs. st-and. ac. uk/ history/Mathematicians/Eddington. html contains a brief biography of Sir Arthur Eddington, who first proposed the phrase arrow of time . 

Payne was born in 1900 in Wendover, England, to an upper-class family. Her early education was in botany, physics, and chemistry, but her passion was astronomy. In 1922, she heard a lecture by Harlow Shapley, the director of the Harvard College Observatory. The lecture inspired her to seek admission to Harvard, and with strong recommendations from her mentors in England, including Sir Arthur Eddington, she was admitted and arrived on campus in 1923. Two years later, in 1925, she became the first student, male or female, to earn a Ph.D. from the Harvard College Observatory. 

In Sir Arthur Eddington The Expanding Universe The Universe and the Atom Section IV (p. 113)... 

Page 4. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington From Stars and Atoms, Yale University Press, quoted in A Treasury of Science, Harper Brothers, New York, 1958. 44. 

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