Session O15 - History of Physics followed by FHP Business Meeting.
FOCUS session, Monday morning, April 22
Pecos, Albuquerque Convention Center
Sir Arthur Eddington's brilliant career finished with a flair when the culmination of nearly two decades of work was posthumously published under the title 'Fundamental Theory.' It was Eddington's attempt to merge relativity and quantum mechanics and, in fact, was one of the earliest attempts to develop a Theory of Everything (TOE). It was a cumbersome and obscure work that enjoyed some initial success largely out of deference to his other brilliant work. But the work has been largely a historical oddity for the past half century. But an analysis of his treatment of uncertainty in the reference frame, the introductory segment of this tome, has proven Eddington to have had more forsight than he was originally given credit for. The merging of relativity and quantum mechanics is addressed by introducing uncertainty into the coordinate system of relativity. Along the way he astutely predicts several items that have only recently become apparent including the need for a quantum-specified standard of length and even certain aspects of string theory. A reanalysis of this portion of his somewhat forgotten work has shown more wisdom and forsight than he was ever credited with and has a tremendous amount of historical significance to the study of the development of quantum field theory and cosmology.