Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-956mj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-16T19:00:34.543Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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
Get access

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.

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aiton, E. J., The Vortex Theory of Planetary Motions (London: MacDonald and New York: American Elsevier Inc., 1972).Google Scholar
Bennett, J. A., “‘On the Power of Penetrating into Space’: The Telescopes of William Herschel,” Journal for the History of Astronomy, 7 (1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bigourdan, G., “Le Bureau des Longitudes: Son Histoire et ses Travaux de l’origine (1795) à ce jour,” France, Bureau des Longitudes, Annuaire (1931).Google Scholar
Brush, Stephen G., Nebulous Earth (Cambridge University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Chapin, Seymour L., “The Shape of the Earth,” in Taton, René and Wilson, Curtis (eds.), Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics, Part B: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar
d’Alembert, Jean, Recherches sur differens points importans du système du monde, Premiere Partie (Paris, 1754).Google Scholar
Delambre, Jean-Baptiste Joseph, Histoire de l’astronomie au dix-huitième siècle (Paris: 1827)Google Scholar
Euler, Leonhard, “De la variation de la latitude des étoiles fixes et de l’obliquité de l’écliptique,” Mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences de Berlin, 10 (1754, 1756).Google Scholar
Gaythorpe, S. B., “Jeremiah Horrocks and his ‘New Theory of the Moon,’” Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 67 (1957)Google Scholar
Grant, Robert, History of Physical Astronomy (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1966).Google Scholar
Greenberg, John, “Geodesy in Paris in the 1730s and the Paduan Connection,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 13 (1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenberg, , The Problem of the Earth’s Shape from Newton to Clairaut (Cambridge University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Harper, William and Smith, George E., “Newton’s New Way of Inquiry,” in Leplin, Jarrett (ed.), The Creation of Ideas in Physics (Boston: Kluwer, 1995).Google Scholar
Hoskin, Michael, Stellar Astronomy: Historical Studies (Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks, England: Science History Publications, 1982).Google Scholar
Iliffe, Rob, “‘Aplatisseur du monde et de Cassini’: Maupertuis, Precision Measurement, and the Shape of the Earth in the 1730s,” History of Science, 31 (1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Katz, Victor J., “The Calculus of the Trigonometric Functions,” Historia Mathematica, 14 (1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kollerstrom, Nick and Yallop, Bernard D., “Flamsteed’s Lunar Data, 1692–95, Sent to Newton,” Journal for the History of Astronomy, 26 (1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Numbers, Ronald L., Creation by Natural Law: Laplace’s Nebular Hypothesis in American Thought (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977)Google Scholar
Pourciau, Bruce, “On Newton’s Proof That Inverse-Square Orbits Must Be Conics,” Annals of Science, 48 (1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pourciau, , “Newton’s Solution of the One-Body Problem,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 44 (1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rigaud, S. P. (ed.), Miscellaneous Works and Correspondence of the Rev. James Bradley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1832).Google Scholar
Schaffer, Simon, “The Phoenix of Nature: Fire and Evolutionary Cosmology in Wright and Kant,” Journal for the History of Astronomy, 9 (1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schaffer, Simon, “Uranus and the Establishment of Herschel’s Astronomy,” Journal for the History of Astronomy, 12 (1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sobel, Dava, Longitude (New York: Walker Publishing, 1995).Google Scholar
Stein, Howard, “‘From the Phenomena of Motions to the Forces of Nature’: Hypothesis or Deduction?” in Fine, Arthur, Forbes, Micky, and Wessels, Linda (eds.), Proceedings of the 1990 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association (1991), vol. 2.Google Scholar
Terrall, Mary, “Representing the Earth’s Shape: The Polemics Surrounding Maupertuis’s Expedition to Lapland,” Isis, 83 (1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tristram, Florence, Le procès des étoiles (Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1979) (on the Peruvian expedition).Google Scholar
Whewell, William, address, in Report of the Third Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London, 1833).Google Scholar
Whiteside, D. T., “The Mathematical Principles Underlying Newton’s Principia,” Journal for the History of Astronomy, 1 (1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Curtis, “Predictive Astronomy in the Century after Kepler,” in Taton, René and Wilson, Curtis (eds.), Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics, Part A: Tycho Brahe to Newton (Cambridge University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Wilson, Curtis, “Horrocks, Harmonies, and the Exactitude of Kepler’s Third Law,” in Science and History: Studies in Honor of Edward Rosen (Studia Copernicana 16; Warsaw: The Polish Academy of Sciences Press, 1978).Google Scholar
Wilson, Curtis, “On the Origin of Horrocks’s Lunar Theory,” Journal for the History of Astronomy, 18 (1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Curtis, “Euler on action-at-a-distance and Fundamental Equations in Continuum Mechanics,” in Harman, P. M. and Shapiro, Alan E. (eds.), The Investigation of Difficult Things (Cambridge University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Wilson, Curtis, “The Great Inequality of Jupiter and Saturn: From Kepler to Laplace,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 33 (1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Curtis, “Perturbations and Solar Tables from Lacaille to Delambre,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 22 (1980).Google Scholar
Wilson, Curtis, “D’Alembert versus Euler on the Precession of the Equinoxes and the Mechanics of Rigid Bodies,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 37 (1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Curtis, “Clairaut’s Calculation of the Eighteenth-century Return of Halley’s Comet,” Journal for the History of Astronomy, 24 (1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Curtis, “The Great Inequality of Jupiter and Saturn,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 33 (1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woolf, Harry, The Transits of Venus: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • 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
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • 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
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • 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
×