Kant's Cosmogony as in His Essay on the Retardation of the Rotation of the Earth and His Natural History and Theory of the Heavens PDF Download

Author: Immanuel Kant
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cosmogony
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Author: Immanuel Kant
Publisher: Burns & Oates
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Author: Tofigh Heidarzadeh
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402083238
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Although the development of ideas about the motion and trajectory of comets has been investigated piecemeal, we lack a comprehensive and detailed survey of ph- ical theories of comets. The available works either illustrate relatively short periods in the history of physical cometology or portray a landscape view without adequate details. The present study is an attempt to review – with more details – the major physical theories of comets in the past two millennia, from Aristotle to Whipple. My research, however, did not begin with antiquity. The basic question from which this project originated was a simple inquiry about the cosmic identity of comets at the dawn of the astronomical revolution: how did natural philosophers and astronomers define the nature and place of a new category of celestial objects – comets – after Brahe’s estimation of cometary distances? It was from this turning point in the history of cometary theories that I expanded my studies in both the pre-modern and modern eras. A study starting merely from Brahe and ending with Newton, without covering classical and medieval thought about comets, would be incomplete and leave the fascinating achievements of post-Newtonian cometology unexplored.

Author: Wolfgang Yourgrau
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461587808
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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It is difficult to doubt that we suffer at present from the manifold aspects of an economic crisis which affects all walks of life. Well, men in almost every epoch in history have maintained that they were going through a crisis which was sup posed to be always more grave than any preceding critical phase. Very often those crises were not of an economic nature, but concerned either health, the political structure, the opportunity of acquiring knowledge, and so on. I think that we would consider today that some of those claims that were made in various historical epochs were often exaggerated if viewed from a historical point of view. However, it seems undeniable that we at present are in the middle of a universal economic crisis which has affected almost every facet of our daily life. And yet, the fact that despite these adverse conditions it is still possible to gather scholars from all corners of the world to deal with often sheer theo retical and sometimes abstract pursuits is a refutation of any facile pessimism it is reassuring to all who wonder where political and social events are taking us. Our salvation may well come from those acts of the mind so character istic of the pure scientist and scholar.

Author: Sara Schechner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691227675
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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In a lively investigation into the boundaries between popular culture and early-modern science, Sara Schechner presents a case study that challenges the view that rationalism was at odds with popular belief in the development of scientific theories. Schechner Genuth delineates the evolution of people's understanding of comets, showing that until the seventeenth century, all members of society dreaded comets as heaven-sent portents of plague, flood, civil disorder, and other calamities. Although these beliefs became spurned as "vulgar superstitions" by the elite before the end of the century, she shows that they were nonetheless absorbed into the science of Newton and Halley, contributing to their theories in subtle yet profound ways. Schechner weaves together many strands of thought: views of comets as signs and causes of social and physical changes; vigilance toward monsters and prodigies as indicators of God's will; Christian eschatology; scientific interpretations of Scripture; astrological prognostication and political propaganda; and celestial mechanics and astrophysics. This exploration of the interplay between high and low beliefs about nature leads to the conclusion that popular and long-held views of comets as divine signs were not overturned by astronomical discoveries. Indeed, they became part of the foundation on which modern cosmology was built.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Jacob Gould Schurman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic journals
Languages : en
Pages : 752

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An international journal of general philosophy.

Author: Immanuel Kant
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cosmogony
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Author: E. Wilson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403981809
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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At the end of the eighteenth century, scientists for the first time demonstrated what medieval and renaissance alchemists had long suspected; ice is not lifeless but vital, a crystalline revelation of vigorous powers. Studied in esoteric and exoterical representations of frozen phenomena, several Romantic figures - including Coleridge and Poe, Percy and Mary Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau - challenged traditional notions of ice as waste and instead celebrated crystals, glaciers, and the poles as special disclosures of a holistic principle of being. The Spiritual History of Ice explores this ecology of frozen shapes in fascinating detail, revealing not only a neglected current of the Romantic age but also a secret history and psychology of ice.

Author: John M. Steele
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461421497
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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The discovery of a gradual acceleration in the moon’s mean motion by Edmond Halley in the last decade of the seventeenth century led to a revival of interest in reports of astronomical observations from antiquity. These observations provided the only means to study the moon’s ‘secular acceleration’, as this newly-discovered acceleration became known. This book contains the first detailed study of the use of ancient and medieval astronomical observations in order to investigate the moon’s secular acceleration from its discovery by Halley to the establishment of the magnitude of the acceleration by Richard Dunthorne, Tobias Mayer and Jérôme Lalande in the 1740s and 1750s. Making extensive use of previously unstudied manuscripts, this work shows how different astronomers used the same small body of preserved ancient observations in different ways in their work on the secular acceleration. In addition, this work looks at the wider context of the study of the moon’s secular acceleration, including its use in debates of biblical chronology, whether the heavens were made up of æther, and the use of astronomy in determining geographical longitude. It also discusses wider issues of the perceptions and knowledge of ancient and medieval astronomy in the early-modern period. This book will be of interest to historians of astronomy, astronomers and historians of the ancient world.