| Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989. | | | |
|
| | | NUMBER: | 2076 |
| AUTHOR: | Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) |
| QUOTATION: | If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. |
| ATTRIBUTION: | ARTHUR S. EDDINGTON, The Nature of the Physical World, chapter 4, p. 72 (1928). Eddington calls this “a rather classical illustration” of chance.
A discussion of this concept is in William Ralph Bennett, Scientific and Engineering Problem-solving with the Computer, chapter 4, p. 105 (1976).
A similar quotation was attributed, apparently incorrectly, to [Thomas Henry?] Huxley by Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, p. 4 (1931). |
| SUBJECTS: | Writers and writing |
| BIOGRAPHY: | Columbia Encyclopedia | | |
|
|
