John Herschel and Mary Somerville: Astronomical Legacy and the Proprietary British Scientist

Abstract

The time period between Halley and Newton, and Cook and Banks and Herschel was about the changing ideas of pure discovery in science and the somewhat less pure discoveries as executed by the expanding British Empire. The uneasy synthesis of empiricism and idealism contained within its demystification of the natural world the staggering complexity of that world and humanity’s spatial and temporal position in such a universe. The responses to the natural and the supernatural tentatively explored in the works of Coleridge through optics, planetary motions, dynamic systems, and navigation come to fruition in Keats, Shelley, and Rossetti. The time period from 1819 to 1870, dominated by the astronomer mathematicians John Herschel and Mary Somerville, followed the expansion and systematization of knowledge of the natural world with the diffusion of that knowledge to the general public. This diffusion occurred through the establishment of new types of science and mathematics and new societies for their advancement and dissemination.