"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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University of Cambridge facultyTheologians from EnglandMathematicians from EnglandPacifistsAnglican bishops
Original Language: English
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Gerald James Whitrow, The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology (1949)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ernest_Barnes
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Ernest Barnes
Ernest William Barnes (April 1, 1874 – November 29, 1953) was an English mathematician and scientist who became a and was ordained in the in 1902. In 1898 he was awarded the first Smith's Prize in mathematics. In mathematics he is remembered for the Mellin-Barnes Integrals and for the Barnes G-function, a contribution to the theory of transcendental functions. Barnes was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1909 and served as the Bishop of Birmingham from 1924 to 1953.
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