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Arthur Stanley Eddington


Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington OM, F.R.S. ( 1882 - 1944 )
Location of IOP blue Plaque Stramongate Quaker School in Kendal, Westmorland until 1976, since then the area is known as Cumbria
Unveiled March 1998 IOP Branch see Dalton
Born: 28 December 1882 in Kendal
Died: 22 November 1944 in Cambridge

This plaque is green; it jointly commemorates John Dalton and Sir Arthur Eddington, both of whom were associated with this school. Eddington was born at the school, where his father was headmaster, in 1882. He was the first to verify Einstein's General Theory of Relativity by experiment, measuring the curvature of light passing close to the sun during a solar eclipse in 1919.

He was a mathematician and astrophysicist and sometime chief assistant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge. He was the author of popular scientific books such as The Nature of the Physical World and The Expanding Universe.

There is a Blue Plaque on the house where he lived at 4 Bennett Park, Blackheath, London SE3.


Page last updated 30 October 2012