This book argues that while the historiography of the development of scientific ideas has for some time acknowledged the important influences of socio-cultural and material contexts, the significant impact of traumatic events, life threatening illnesses and other psychotropic stimuli on the development of scientific thought may not have been fully recognised. Howard Carlton examines the available primary sources which provide insight into the lives of a number of nineteenth-century astronomers, theologians and physicists to study the complex interactions within their ‘biocultural’ brain-body systems which drove parallel changes of perspective in theology, metaphysics, and cosmology. In doing so, he also explores three topics of great scientific interest during this period: the question of the possible existence of life on other planets; the deployment of the nebular hypothesis as a theory of cosmogony; and the religiously charged debates about the ages of the earth and sun. From this body of evidence we gain a greater understanding of the underlying phenomena which actuated intellectual developments in the past and which are still relevant to today’s knowledge-making processes.
Author(s): Howard Carlton
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 315
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
About the Book
Contents
Part I: Introduction
Chapter 1: Crisis and Cosmology: The Subtle Interactions of Mind, Body and Belief
Experience, Emotions and Weltmodelle
Victorian Experiences of Illness and Death
Psychotropic Drugs in the Nineteenth Century
Victorian Religion
Subjects and Sources
Structure of This Book
Astronomic Emotions
Part II: The Extraterrestrial Life Debate
Chapter 2: Planets and Pluralism: How Many Revelations Are Required to Redeem the Entire Universe?
The Origins of Pluralism
Thomas Paine and the Age of Reason
Supporters and Opponents of Paine’s Thesis
William Paley’s Natural Theology
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Interstellar Imperialism
Chapter 3: “In Yonder Hundred Million Spheres”: Thomas Chalmers and His Conversion to Pluralism
Chalmers’ Conversion Experience
The Influence of Blaise Pascal
Chalmers and the Age of the Earth
Chalmers Addresses the ‘Astronomical Objection’
Chalmers’ Theology and Political Economics
Extraterrestrial Evangelism
Chapter 4: “What Is Man if Thou Art Mindful of Him?”: William Whewell and the Unique Revelation
William Whewell’s Declining Support for Pluralism
Whewell’s Response to Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Of the Plurality of Worlds: An Essay
Cordelia Whewell’s Terminal Illness
The Essay: Whewell’s Response to His Wife’s Illness and a Rebuttal of Chalmers
Whewell and Politics
Cosmology as Consolation
Chapter 5: Richard Proctor and Private Judgement
Proctor’s Conversion to Catholicism
Proctor and Pluralism
John Tyndall and the Belfast Address
Proctor’s Response to Catholic Critics
Heterodox Theological Views of Proctor and His Colleagues
Universal Evolution
Untitled
Part III: The Nebular Hypothesis
Chapter 6: John Pringle Nichol, the Nebular Hypothesis and Progressive Cosmogony
Origins of the Nebular Hypothesis
John Pringle Nichol’s Early Career in Polemics
Nichol’s Breakdown
Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow
Nichol’s Exposition of the Nebular Hypothesis
Nichol’s Political Views Post 1836
Nichol and Continuous Creation
Progressive Evolution
Chapter 7: “And Eddied into Suns, that Wheeling Cast/The Planets”: Rosse, Robinson and the Leviathan of Parsonstown
The Leviathan of Parsonstown
Laurence Parsons and the Death of John Clere Parsons
Political Upheavals and the Irish Famine
Rosse, Robinson and Early Observations of the Nebulae
Mechanical Objectivity and the Art of Drawing
Artistic Responses to the Leviathan and the Orion Nebula
Nichol’s Initial Response to the ‘Resolvability’ of the Orion Nebula
Chapter 8: “In Tracts of Fluent Heat Began”: Nichol Defends and Develops Nebular Cosmogony
Nichol Reframes the Birr Castle Observations
Nichol’s Lecture Tours
Reception of Nichol’s Presentations
John Herschel: Development of a Recognised Authority
John Herschel and the Nebular Hypothesis
The Emergence of Doubt
The Stellar Universe
Opiate Addiction
Support from William Whewell and Herbert Spencer
The Elusiveness of Objectivity in the Making of Cosmogonies
Part IV: The Ages of the Earth and Sun
Chapter 9: “And Murmurs from the Dying Sun”: William Thomson, Thermodynamics and Theology
The North British Physicists
Scottish Education
William Thomson’s Upbringing and Early Career
Geological and Biological Time
Thomson’s Intervention in Temporal Debates
The Law of Dissipation and Human Longevity
William Thomson, Consciousness and Atomic Theory
Chronology, Chloroform and Calvinism
Chapter 10: The North Britons: Physics and Metaphysics
Fleeming Jenkin and the Chronology Debate
Peter Guthrie Tait’s Support for William Thomson
James Clerk Maxwell and Free Will
Balfour Stewart and Joseph Norman Lockyer
Further Contributions from Jenkin and Maxwell
The Unseen Universe
The North British Group and the Immaterial Universe
Bibliography
Archive Sources
Bibliography of Primary Sources
Bibliography of Secondary Sources
Index
