Audio log: Eddington entering a room

This is an audio log from a piece where Arthur Eddington explains all of the factors that a physicist would have to accout for when they enter a room.

## Location

To find this audio tape, open the main gate in the Entry Area, and head down the path and hang a left to find a hill leading onto the Entry Area's ramparts. Take the left path along the ramparts until you are above the main gate, where you'll find the small log on the far side of the gate's top.

## Transcript

I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place, I must shove against an atmosphere
pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun - a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body.

The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on.

I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady, but if, unfortunately, I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. These are some of the minor difficulties.

I ought really to look at the problem four-dimensionally as concerning the intersection of my world-line with that of the plank.
Then again, it is necessary to determine in which direction the entropy of the world is increasing in order to make sure that my passage over the threshold is an entrance, not an exit.

Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.

Arthur Eddington, 1927

## Literal interpretation

This audio log is placed - literally - on top of a doorway. It functions as the exit to the Entry Area but also as the entrance to the Secret ending area. This means that this doorway happens to be both an entrance and an exit at the same time.

## Literary context

This piece of text is taken from the same place as the other Eddington pieces. A book called "The Nature of the Physical World", chapter 15. These are the final few paragraphs.

The idea of the chapter is to show the different ways of looking at science versus mysticism. This final part is an argument that just looking at if you look at thing in a purely scientific way, you will be so hung up on the way in which things are a strange balance that is very abstract and seems dangerous, that you will not be able to live your life in a normal way.
The idea that the Earth moves at a breakneck speed across space is important for our survival, but has no relation to how we should live our lives.

The idea here is that while science is important for understanding the universe, it might not have any impact on most of our day-to-day lives. This means that it might be necessary sometimes to forget about physics and just live as if you're living in a magical world where things just happen in order to actually get things done.

## Relation to the six themes of the Witness

This log relates to Theme 4: Fatalism.

While the overall message of this piece is hopeful and practical, it also describes the way that a search for knowledge can be destructive. Eddington describes the way that the simple act of stepping through a door could be completely terrifying when looked at from a purely scientific perspective, even though it's one of the safer activities we could undertake. The fact that there is an infinitessimal chance of us missing the floor and shooting out into space (purely in theory), it's absurd to entertain the notion that this would ever happen.

In short: the search for truth can lead us to ruin and prevent us from living our lives.