Arthur Eddington

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington was an English astrophysicist and mathematician, born in 1882, after whom the Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars, is named. Around 1920 he foreshadowed nuclear fusion in stars in his paper The Internal Constitution of the Stars, and he was the first to speculate correctly that the source of stellar energy was the fusion of hydrogen into helium. He wrote articles that announced and explained Einstein's theory of general relativity to the English-speaking world and conducted an expedition to the island of Principe to observe the solar eclipse of 29 May 1919, which gave one of the earliest confirmations of the theory. He was also a popularizer of science and a philosopher of science who speculated on the implications of quantum mechanics for mind and matter.