The philosophical consequences of the General Theory of Relativity are perhaps more striking than the experimental tests. As Bishop Barnes has remind… - Gerald James Whitrow

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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...

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About Gerald James Whitrow

Gerald James Whitrow (9 June 1912 – 2 June 2000) or G. J. Whitrow, was a British mathematician, cosmologist and historian of science.

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Alternative Names: G J Whitrow Gerald J Whitrow G. J. Whitrow Gerald J. Whitrow Gerald Whitrow Whitrow, Gerald James Whitrow, Gerald J.
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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.

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.

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Although the peculiarly fundamental nature of time in relation to ourselves is evident as soon as we reflect that our judgments concerning time and events in time appear themselves to be 'in' time, whereas our judgments concerning space do not appear themselves in any obvious sense to be in space, physicists have been influenced far more profoundly by the fact that space seems to be presented to us all of a piece, whereas time comes to us only bit by bit. The past must be recalled by the dubious aid of memory, the future is hidden from us, and only the present is directly experienced. This striking dissimilarity between space and time has nowhere had a greater influence than in physical science based on the concept of measurement. Free mobility in space leads to the idea of the transportable unit length and the rigid measuring rod. The absence of free mobility in time makes it much more difficult for us to be sure that a process takes the same time whenever it is repeated.

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