Gerald James Whitrow 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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

Perhaps the first to approach the fourth dimension from the side of physics, was the Frenchman, Nicole Oresme, of the fourteenth century. In a manuscript treatise, he sought a graphic representation of the Aristotelian forms, such as heat, velocity, sweetness, by laying down a line as a basis designated longitudo, and taking one of the forms to be represented by lines (straight or circular) perpendicular to this either as a latitudo or an altitudo. The form was thus represented graphically by a surface. Oresme extended this process by taking a surface as the basis which, together with the latitudo, formed a solid. Proceeding still further, he took a solid as a basis and upon each point of this solid he entered the increment. He saw that this process demanded a fourth dimension which he rejected; he overcame the difficulty by dividing the solid into numberless planes and treating each plane in the same manner as the plane above, thereby obtaining an infinite number of solids which reached over each other. He uses the phrase "fourth dimension" (4^am dimensionem).

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.

Consider an event, for example the outburst if a nova... Suppose this event is observed from two stars in line with the nova, and suppose further that the two stars are moving uniformly with respect to each other in this line. Let the epoch at which these stars passed by each other be taken as the zero of time measurement, and let an observer A on one of the stars estimate the distance and epoch of the nova outburst to be x units of length and t units of time, respectively. Suppose the other star is moving toward the nova with velocity v relative to A. Let an observer B on the star estimate the distance and epoch of the nova outburst to be x<nowiki>'</nowiki> units of length and t<nowiki>'</nowiki> units of time, respectively. Then the Lorentz formulae, relating x<nowiki>'</nowiki> to t<nowiki>'</nowiki>, are<math>x' = \frac {x-vt}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}} ; \qquad t' = \frac {t-\frac{vx}{c^2}}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}</math>
These formulae are... quite general, applying to any event in line with two uniformly moving observers. If we let c become infinite then the ratio of v to c tends to zero and the formulae become<math>x' = x - vt ; \qquad t' = t</math>.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.