| Description |
1 online resource (xii, 315 pages) |
| Contents |
Intro -- 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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
| Summary |
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 todays knowledge-making processes. Howard Carlton received his PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK. His research explores a number of nineteenth-century astronomical controversies in order to demonstrate that the ideas of participants in these debates were materially altered by traumatic life-events, as evidenced by their subsequent productions and their performances of altered selves |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
Scientists -- Intellectual life -- 19th century
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Cosmology -- History -- 19th century
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Cosmology
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| Genre/Form |
History
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9783031052804 |
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3031052803 |
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