Even in the first half of the 20th century, astronomers had to be content with the uniformity of nature argument confirmed by spectroscopy. In an article in Science in 1920, the American astronomer W. W. Campbell (a great opponent of Lowell…5. Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 224–225, 274–277, 464–465. Simon Schaffer has shown the place of the nebular hypothesis in a general “science of progress” i…7. On Lowell as Spencerian, and as influenced by Spencer’s American disciple John Fiske, see David Strauss, Percival Lowell: The Culture and Science of a Boston Brahmin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 97–165.
8. W. W. …
Helge Kragh
historian · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Helge Kragh is a historian of science specializing in cosmology and the history of extraterrestrial life debates. Though he appears here only in citation form—likely as a reference work on the history of astronomical thought and the cultural contexts shaping 20th-century theories of life in the universe—his work provides the historiographical scaffolding for understanding how scientific uniformitarianism and progress narratives shaped beliefs about cosmic habitability. His presence in these footnotes suggests the course is drawing on his scholarship to ground claims about how ideological frameworks (Spencerianism, Victorian progressivism) infiltrated ostensibly objective astronomical observation.
Mentioned in 1 reading
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.
Percival Lowell 2Steven J. Dick 2William Wallace Campbell 2Alfred Russel Wallace 1Charles Darwin 1Charles H. Smith 1David DeVorkin 1David Strauss 1George Beccaloni 1George Ellery Hale 1Herbert Spencer 1John Fiske 1June Goodfield 1Michael Shermer 1Stephen Toulmin 1Isaac Newton 1Alexander Ivanovich Oparin 1Carl Sagan 1G. M. Tovmasyan 1George Wald 1Harold Spencer Jones 1Iris Fry 1Joseph Shklovsky 1Lawrence Joseph Henderson 1Vasily Grigorievich Fesenkov 1Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis 1