Abstract
Astronomers in the late nineteenth century and at the very start of the twentieth century were very little interested in the broader universe, its history and what lay beyond our galactic system as well as what is sometimes termed the thermodynamic cosmos. Some were very concerned with the structure of our own stellar system, but astronomers played next to no part in debates at the end of the nineteenth century about the wider nature of the cosmos. The infinite universe beyond our stellar system was territory professional astronomers were more than were happy to leave to mathematicians, physicists, philosophers, and some popularizers. In this paper I will examine these attitudes and why and how they changed. I will then discuss the discovery of galaxies, which will be the focus of the final section of the paper.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Anon 1924, “Finds spiral nebulae are stellar systems; Dr. Hubbell [sic] confirms view that they are ‘island universes’ similar to our own,” New York Times, November 23, 1924, 6.
Ball, R.S. 1893, The High Heavens.
Brück, M. 2002, Agnes Mary Clerke and the Rise of Astrophysics.
Clerke, A. M. 1890, The System of the Stars.
Darwin, G.H. 1905. “Cosmical Evolution,” The Observatory, 38, pp. 401–5.
Dick, S. 2008, “The Universe and Alfred Russel Wallace,” pp. 320–340 in Smith, C.H. & Beccaloni, G. (eds.) Natural Selection and Beyond: The Intellectual Legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace.
Hubble, E. to Shapley, H., 19 February 1924, Harvard University Archives.
Huggins, W. 1866, On the Results of Spectrum Analysis.
Hunt, B.J. 2010, Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert Einstein.
Jaki, S.L. 1969. The Paradox of Olbers’ Paradox: A Case History of Scientific Thought.
Jaki, S.L. 1972. The Milky Way: An Elusive Road for Science.
Kragh, H. 2008, Entropic Creation: Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology.
Kragh, H. 2012, “Geometry and Astronomy: Pre-Einstein Speculations of Non-Euclidean Space,” http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.4909.
Neswald, E. 2006. Thermodynamik als kultureller Kampflatz. Zur Faszinationgeschichte der Entropie 1850–1915.
Neswald, E. 2014, “Saving the World in the Age of Entropy: John Tyndall and the Second Law of Thermodynamics,” pp. 15–32, in Lightman, Bernard, and Reidy, Michael S., The Age of Scientific Naturalism: Tyndall and his Contemporaries.
Paul, E.R. 1993, The Milky Way Galaxy and Statistical Cosmology 1890–1914.
Proctor, R.A. 1869, “The distribution of nebulae,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 29, pp. 337–44.
Robinson, T.R. 1845, ‘On Lord Rosse’s telescopes,’ Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 3(1845–47), 114–33.
Schaffer, S. 1989, “The nebular hypothesis and the science of progress,” pp. 131–64, in Moore, J.R. (ed.) History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene.
Smith, C. 1999. The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain.
Slipher, V.M. 1913, “The Radial Velocity of the Andromeda Nebula,” Lick Observatory Bulletin, 2, 56–7.
Smith, R.W. 1982, The Expanding Universe: Astronomy’s ‘Great Debate’ 1900–1931.
Smith, R.W., 2006, Robert W. Smith, “Beyond the Big Galaxy: The structure of the stellar system 1900–1952,” Journal for the history of astronomy, 37, pp. 307–42.
Smith, R.W. 2008, “Beyond the Galaxy: the development of extragalactic astronomy 1885 - 1965 Part 1,” Journal for the history of astronomy, 39, pp. 91–119.
Smith, R.W., 2009, “Beyond the Galaxy: the development of extragalactic astronomy 1885 - 1965 Part 2,” Journal for the history of astronomy, 40, pp. 71–107.
Smith, R.W. 2014, “The 'Great Plan of the Visible Universe:’ William Huggins, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Nature of the Nebulae,” pp. 113–136, in in Lightman, Bernard, and Reidy, Michael S., The Age of Scientific Naturalism: Tyndall and his Contemporaries.
Van der Kruit, P.C. & Van Berkel, K., 2001, The Legacy of J.C. Kapteyn: Studies on Kapteyn and the Development of Modern Astronomy.
Wallace, A.R. 1903, Man’s Place in the Universe.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Smith, R. (2015). A One Galaxy Universe, the Discovery of Galaxies and the Shift to Modern Approaches to the Cosmos. In: Freeman, K., Elmegreen, B., Block, D., Woolway, M. (eds) Lessons from the Local Group. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10614-4_33
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10614-4_33
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-10613-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-10614-4
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)