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14 - Astronomy and Cosmology

from Part II - Disciplines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Curtis Wilson
Edited by
Roy Porter
Roy Porter
Affiliation:
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
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Summary

During the eighteenth century the astronomy of the solar system became, in the words of William Whewell, “the queen of the sciences… the only perfect science… in which particulars are completely subjugated to generals, effects to causes.” The striking theoretical advances Whewell refers to were the work of Continental mathematicians, members of scientific academies in Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, who, through elaborating the algorithms of the Leibnizian differential and integral calculus, elicited the consequences of Newtonian gravitation. Meanwhile, instrument-makers, chiefly British, so refined telescopes and graduated arcs that observational precision kept pace with theoretical prediction. Observatories, the chief of them nationally funded, took pride in contributing not only to the navigational needs of their nations’ navies and merchant marines but also to the supranational goal of a perfected astronomy.

Ancillary to planetary and lunar astronomy was the construction of star catalogs: it was in relation to star positions that the positions of planets and the Moon were determined. The puzzle of apparent systematic motions of the stars was unraveled by James Bradley between 1729 and 1748 – a sine qua non for an astronomy precise to arcseconds. Meanwhile, a few thinkers speculated as to the large-scale structure of the universe. If gravitation were universal, why did not the stars collapse into one another? Was the cosmos a stable structure or in the process of change? Toward the end of the century, dynamical arguments and observational evidence were brought to bear on these questions and led to a new vision of an evolving stellar world.

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The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 328 - 353
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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  • Astronomy and Cosmology
  • Edited by Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Science
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.015
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  • Astronomy and Cosmology
  • Edited by Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Science
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.015
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

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  • Astronomy and Cosmology
  • Edited by Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Science
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.015
Available formats
×