 One of Stebbing’s main targets was Sir Arthur Eddington, a then prominent public figure whose photographs of the eclipse in 1919 had helped to confirm Einstein’s theory of relativity. Eddington liked to grip his readers’ attention and their imagination by requiring them to consider everyday experiences in the light of scientific discoveries. In this passage from his popular book The Nature of the Physical World (1935), he is concerned with the atomic theory of matter: