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Updated: May 13, 2025
We might, indeed, add that if we were to include all the objects which are now known to belong to the solar system, the argument from probability might be enormously increased in strength. To Laplace the argument appeared so conclusive that he sought for some physical cause of the remarkable phenomenon which the solar system presented. Thus it was that the famous Nebular Hypothesis took its rise.
Its stars are innumerable, varying from the ninth magnitude downward to the last limit of visibility, and presenting a wonderful array of curves which are highly interesting from the point of view of the nebular origin of such clusters.
They had stood looking around at the huge broken slabs of granite and speculating upon the oddness of the formation, while their conversation had taken on an academic flavor as they discussed the nebular and glacial theories. They had discovered at the bottom of a great cleft in the rock, a spring of sparkling water, so cold that it was impossible to drink it without frequent pauses.
Agassiz, certainly, who adopts a remarkable illustration of design directly founded on the nebular hypothesis, drawing from the position and times of revolution of the worlds so originated "direct evidence that the physical world has been ordained in conformity with laws which obtain also among living beings."
The brunt of the controversy settled about the unstratified rocks granites and their allies which the Plutonists claimed as of igneous origin. This contention had the theoretical support of the nebular hypothesis, then gaining ground, which supposed the earth to be a cooling globe.
It may be well to remember that, "of the two great minds of the seventeenth century, Newton and Leibnitz, both profoundly religious as well as philosophical, one produced the theory of gravitation, the other objected to that theory that it was subversive of natural religion; also that the nebular hypothesis a natural consequence of the theory of gravitation and of the subsequent progress of physical and astronomical discovery has been denounced as atheistical even down to our day."
Four hundred and ninety of them cannot competently examine either a religious plan or a political one. A scattering few of them do examine both that is, they think they do. With results as precious as when I examine the nebular theory and explain it to myself.
Ambition as regards telescopic power is by no means yet satisfied. Nor ought it to be. The advance of astrophysical researches of all kinds depends largely upon light-grasp. For the spectroscopic examination of stars, for the measurement of their motions in the line of sight, for the discovery and study of nebulæ, for stellar and nebular photography, the cry continually is "more light."
But to this arrangement, which is explicable neither as the result of design nor of chance, the Nebular Hypothesis furnishes a clue. In his Exposition du Système du Monde, Laplace shows, by reasoning too detailed to be here repeated, that under the circumstances such a relation of movements would be likely to establish itself.
From my meals I returned to my table in the library and read until closing time, conserving in every way my thirty cents' worth of "food units." In this way I covered a wide literary and scientific territory. Humped over my fitful register I discussed the Nebular Hypothesis.
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