In these lectures the author Eddington discusses some of the results of
modern study of the physical world which give most food for philosophic
thought. This will include new conceptions in science and also new
knowledge. In both respects we are led to think of the material universe
in a way very different from that prevailing at the classical physics.
This book is substantially the course of Gifford Lectures which the
author Eddington delivered in the University of Edinburgh in January to
March 1927. It treats of the philosophical outcome of the great changes
of scientific thought. The theory of relativity and the quantum theory
have led to strange new conceptions of the physical world; the progress
of the principles of thermodynamics has wrought more gradual but no less
profound change.