Gerald James Whitrow

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

— 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— 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

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

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

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