ABSTRACT
ThE journey through the evolution of our understanding of time has taken us from the deserts of Ethiopia to the pyramids of Egypt, through the north China plain, across Salisbury Plain, into Newton’s Cambridge, Kelvin’s Glasgow, Rutherford’s Montreal, Albert Einstein’s Berne and Patterson’s Chicago. In their descriptions of the world, however, physicists have discovered items that do give every indication of being absolutely constant, i.e. they have apparently not changed in value since the Big Bang. Along with these goes Planck’s constant which separates the quantum from the everyday world. These are the real constants of the universe. Arthur Eddington was profoundly interested in the most fundamental of problems about the universe. It realizes that the ultimate aim of physics is to find all the critical constants needed to describe the universe and, equally importantly, to deduce the exact numerical values of all these constants from fundamental theory.
