Arthur Eddington

Arthur was born in Cumbria, UK before moving to Weston-super-Mare as a child. He was not from a wealthy family. But he did so well at school that he got a scholarship to go to Owen's College, Manchester. 

He graduated with a physics degree in 1902. Arthur was then offered a position at Trinity College, Cambridge where he completed his master’s degree. He worked at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, before returning to Cambridge five years later.

He was the first person to come up with the idea that stars are powered by the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium. His predictions of these processes inside of stars were all later proven correct.

He is most famous for his work on Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Arthur made observations of a solar eclipse to confirm the theory. Arthur viewed the eclipse from the island of Principe, off the west coast of Africa. He chose the island because there was a good chance of clear skies, and he could see the eclipse in full there. 

During the darkness of the eclipse, Arthur took photographs of stars close to the Sun. These stars are out-shined by the light of the Sun during the day. Arthur saw that the direction of the light from stars close to the Sun was changed by the pull of the Sun’s gravity. This confirmed Einstein's theory

Arthur's ideas and theoretical models of the inside of stars was crucial, laying the groundwork for other scientists in the 20th century to build upon. The limit to how bright a star can be before it begins to collapse is named after him, the 'Eddington Luminosity'.

As well as being an important physicist in his field of research, Arthur spent a lot of his time writing science books and giving lectures to the public. They were very popular as Arthur's explanations were easy to understand and entertaining, and they inspired many people to become scientists themselves.

Arthur was a Quaker and a pacifist. Luckily, his work was considered so important that it stopped him from military service during the First World War, though he did offer to join an ambulance unit or sometimes work as a harvest labourer on home soil.

Arthur believed that science and religion were not in conflict with one another. Science dealt with the physical world and religion dealt with the spiritual world, but both focused on searching for knowledge.