Gerald James Whitrow Quotes

26 Sourced Quotes

Not until the pioneer work of Rutherford and his colleagues was the possibility of nuclear reactions and transformations as sources of stellar energy envisaged.

Gerald James Whitrow
The history of natural philosophy is characterized by the interplay of two rival philosophies of time — one aiming at its "elimination" and the other based on the belief that it is fundamental and irreducible.

Gerald James Whitrow
Our idea of the universe as a whole remains a product of the imagination.

Gerald James Whitrow
The basic objection to attempts to deduce the unidirectional nature of time from concepts such as entropy is that they are attempts to reduce a more fundamental concept to a less fundamental one.

Gerald James Whitrow
[Time is not] a mysterious illusion of the intellect... It is an essential feature of the universe.

Gerald James Whitrow
From a careful determination of the amount of solar heat that which would fall per minute on an area of one square centimetre placed perpendicular to the radiation as it falls on Earth's surface and from a knowledge of the Earth's distance, we deduce that each square centimetre of the solar surface radiates on the average of about the rate of a nine horse-power engine.

Gerald James Whitrow
Another interesting feature of the Einstein universe is that in principle it could be circumnavigated by a ray of light... it is unlikely that the rays would converge with sufficient accuracy. Nevertheless it is interesting to consider the possibility that some of the stars and nebulae which we see may after all be only optical ghosts.

Gerald James Whitrow
Although the classic theoretical foundation of distance measurement in physics is the 'rigid rod', nearly all distances in surveying, whether terrestrial or celestial, are made to depend on the properties of light. The two simplest properties so employed are the principle of propogation in straight lines and the principle that the intensity of light diminishes inversely as the square of the distance.

Gerald James Whitrow
As the degree of observational accuracy at which general relativity becomes significantly different from Newtonian theory is far from being achieved in this field, and as stellar velocities are small compared with light, there is no sign yet that any non-Newtonian theory is required.

Gerald James Whitrow
Whether the stars were all at the same distance, or whether they were scattered throughout infinite space, or whether they formed a finite system of vast but limited depth, were questions that could not be answered until towards the end of the eighteenth century. Until then, stellar astronomy was a field left to the unaided imagination.

Gerald James Whitrow
The development of rational thought actually seems to have impeded man's appreciation for the significance of time.... Belief that the ultimate reality is timeless is deeply rooted in human thinking, and the origin of rational investigation of the world was the search for permanent factors that lie behind the ever-changing pattern of events.

Gerald James Whitrow
The philosophical consequences of the General Theory of Relativity are perhaps more striking than the experimental tests. As Bishop Barnes has reminded us, "The astonishing thing about Einstein's equations is that they appear to have come out of nothing." We have assumed that the laws of nature must be capable of expression in a form which is invariant for all possible transformations of the space-time co-ordinates and also that the geometry of space-time is Riemannian. From this exiguous basis, formulae of gravitation more accurate than those of Newton have been derived. As Barnes points out...

Gerald James Whitrow
The solution... was found only after the rise of nuclear physics, and, strange to relate, was not known to Eddington when he developed his celebrated theory of stellar structure between 1916 and 1924. Indeed, it is one of the most intriguing facts in the history of science that the two most influential theories concerning the stars—Newton's theory of gravitation and Eddington's theory of stellar construction—were each developed so successfully although Newton was ignorant of the origin of gravitation and Eddington of the origin of stellar energy.

Gerald James Whitrow
Cosmology is peculiar among the sciences for it is both the oldest and the youngest. From the dawn of civilization man has speculated about the nature of the starry heavens and the origin of the world, but only in the present century has physical cosmology split away from general philosophy to become an independent discipline.

Gerald James Whitrow
It became clear that our Galaxy is only one system among many, and that the universe is far vaster than the particular stellar system to which the Sun and planets belong. Since then developments have been more rapid than at any time since the days of Copernicus, Digges and Bruno when the geocentric hypothesis of the cosmos received its death-blow.

Gerald James Whitrow
Einstein's pioneer application in 1917 of his newly developed general relativity to the problem of world-structure ushered in a new phase in the theoretical approach to the subject. Then, some seven years later, Hubble's discovery of Cepheid variables in the Andromeda nebula finally settled the long-debated question concerning this and similar nebulae in the Milky Way.

Gerald James Whitrow
Language itself inevitably introduced an element of permanence into the world. For, although speech itself is transitory, the conventionalized sound symbols of language transcended time.

Gerald James Whitrow
Space-time is curved in the neighborhood of material masses, but it is not clear whether the presence of matter causes the curvature of space-time or whether this curvature is itself responsible for the existence of matter.

Gerald James Whitrow
Man must have been conscious of memories and purposes long before he made any explicit distinction between past, present, and future.

Gerald James Whitrow
Newton's laws of motion and gravitation achieved their original success when applied to the solar system. The first definite evidence that they were applicable on a larger scale came from the study of binary stars towards the eighteenth century. In recent times the limitations of Newton's theory have become apparent. Even on the scale of the solar system, it has been challenged by Einstein's.

Gerald James Whitrow
Our conscious appreciation of the fact that one event follows another is of a different kind from our awareness of either event separately. If two events are to be represented as occurring in succession, then—paradoxically—they must also be thought of simultaneously.

Gerald James Whitrow
By the time of Comte, scientists unanimously rejected the idea that there was any essential difference between celestial and terrestrial matter, but they still had no empirical evidence to support their view any more than had Aristotle to support his, and to the positivist philosopher it seemed that none could ever be obtained.... The possibility of a solution to this problem appeared shortly after Comte's pronouncement with the rise of the science of astronomical spectroscopy...

Gerald James Whitrow
The famous palaeolithic paintings found in caves such as that at Lascaux in the Dordogne have been interpreted as evidence that, at least implicitly people were operating 20,000 or more years ago with teleological intent in terms of past, present, and future. It may well be that those responsible for the so-called 'Dancing Sorcerer'... may have felt that the actual performance of the dance was insufficient, since they were concerned with the magical efficacy of the dance after it ended.

Gerald James Whitrow
To obtain a greater degree of permanence the time symbols of oral speech had to be converted into the space symbols of written speech.... The crucial stage in the evolution of writing occurred when ideographs became phonograms...

Gerald James Whitrow
It must have required enormous effort for man to overcome his natural tendency to live like the animals in a continual present.

Gerald James Whitrow
Although the Special Theory of Relativity does not account for electromagnetic phenomena, it explains many of their properties. General Relativity, however, tells us nothing about electromagnetism. In Einstein's space-time continuum gravitational forces are absorbed in the geometry, but the electromagnetic forces are quite unaffected. Various attempts have been made to generate the geometry of space-time so as to produce a unified field theory incorporating both gravitational and electromagnetic forces.

Gerald James Whitrow