British astrophysicist and mathematician Eddington

On December 28, 1882, British astrophysicist and mathematician Eddington was born in Kendall, England.

Eddington graduated from Owens College (now the University of Manchester) in 1902 and Cambridge University in 1905. From 1906 to 1913 he served as chief assistant to the director of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, after which he returned to Cambridge as Plum Chair Professor of Astronomy.

Eddington's earliest work was on the study of the motion of stars. After that, he began to study the internal structure of stars in 1916. The results of his research were published in his first critical book,"The Internal Structure of Stars." He introduced a phenomenon that had been ignored in the past, that is, the spread of heat energy from the inside to the outside of the planet may be achieved through the huge impact of radiation pressure on the balance of the star. It is achieved by radiation.

It was in this work that Eddington comprehensively summarized the relationship between mass and luminosity. This relationship was discovered in 1924. It pointed out that the more mass a star has, the more light it emits. The value of this conclusion is that if a star's intrinsic brightness is known, its mass can be determined from this brightness. Eddington also realized that there is a limit to the size of stars: stars that can exceed 10 times the mass of the sun are relatively few in number, and any star that is more than 50 times the mass of the sun cannot be stable due to excessive radiation pressure.

Eddington wrote a large number of scientific monographs and popular books. Some of his works are quite popular, including the re-edition of "The Inflating Universe". It was because of Eddington's introduction that Patriot's theory of general relativity spread to English-speaking countries. Eddington was deeply influenced by relativity and provided experimental evidence for this theory. He observed the all-day candle in 1919 and submitted a report reporting that an extremely accurate and unexpected prediction made by Einstein in general relativity was successfully observed. This is the slight bending of light as it passes through the attractive force field of a star (i.e. the sun). In 1924, Einstein's theory received further support: at Eddington's request, Walter Adams detected and measured the shift in the wavelength of the spectral lines of Sirius' high-density white dwarf companion, Sirius' day, thus confirming Einstein's prediction that stellar light would turn red due to the action of attractive force fields. In this way, Eddington did a lot of work to build Einstein's theory on a strict and solid foundation. In his Mathematical Principles of Relativity, Eddington also described this theory with great precision.

For many years, Eddington worked on an esoteric but highly challenging theory that was published only later in his posthumous book, Fundamental Theory. Broadly speaking, Eddington's idea was that the fundamental constants in science, such as the mass of the proton, the mass of the electron, and the charge load, are "natural and complete determinants of the structure of the universe," and their values are not accidental. Eddington had tried to develop a theory that could deduce these values. But failed.