“I am most indebted to E N Parker for calling my attention to Maunders — John A. Eddy

"But my reasons for taking this less-traveled road were many. One is the inevitable thrill of discovery when you wander into new areas. More importantly, you also avoid the danger of being too comfortable in too narrow a niche. I truly believe the sayings that there is no hope for the satisfied man and that without fear there is no learning. Entering a new field with a degree in another is not unlike Lewis and Clark walking into the camp of the Mandans. You are not one of them. They distrust you. Your degree means nothing and your name is not recognized. You have to learn it all from scratch, earn their respect, and learn a lot on your own. But I also think that many of the most significant discoveries in science will be found not in but between the rigid boundaries of the disciplines: the terra incognita where much remains to be learned. Its not a place thats hidebound by practice and ritual. I have always tried to keep moving between fields of study and it shows up, I think, in my vitae.""

"Regarding the claims of Maunder and Sporer: "I started by trying to make it go away, mostly because of a prejudice about sun-weather relationships, and what I thought was true about the sun. In time I realized that there was a more profound and philosophical message in the Maunder Minimum: that people want the Sun to be more constant and regular than perhaps it is."Interview with Jack Eddy, April 21, 1999: In Michigan by phone, conducted by Spencer Weart"

"When we have observed the Sun most intensively, its behavior may have been unusually regular and benign."The Sun: A Biography by David Whitehouse, page 225."

"It has long been though that the sun is a constant star of regular and repeatable behavior. Measurements of the radiative output, or solar constant, seem to justify the first assumption, and the record of periodicity in sunspot numbers is taken as evidence of the second. Both records, however, sample only the most recent history of the sun."Eddy, J.A., "The Maunder Minimum", Science 18 June 1976: Vol. 192. no. 4245, pp. 1189 - 1202, PDF Copy"

"I have reexamined the contemporary reports and new evidence which has come to light since Maunders time and conclude that this 70-year period was indeed a time when solar activity all but stopped. This behavior is wholly unlike the modern behavior of the sun which we have come to accept as normal, and the consequences for solar and terrestrial physics seem to me profound.""

"It would seem that Maunder and Sporer were right and that most of the rest of us have been wrong. As is often the case in the onrush of modern science, we had too quickly forgotten the past, forgotten the less-than-perfect pedigree of the sunspot cycle and the fact that it too once came as a surprise. We had adopted a kind of solar uniformitarianism, contending that the modern behavior of the sun represented the normal behavior of the sun over a much longer span of time.""The Case of the Missing Sunspots"; Scientific American, May 1977, volume 236, issue 5, pages 80-92"