"Nebular" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... exist. Our calendar would still be in all essential respects as it is now; our year with the solstices and equinoxes as its cardinal points. The texture of our poetry might conceivably be the poorer without its star spangles; our philosophy, for the want of a nebular hypothesis. These would be the main differences. Yet, to those who indulge in speculative dreaming, how much smaller life would be with a sun and a moon and a blue beyond for the only visible, the only thinkable universe. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... the state of dream and the state of waking. Such may have been the condition of life in our nebula before the condensation of matter was complete, if it be true that life springs forward at the very moment when, as the effect of an inverse movement, the nebular matter appears. ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... of the solar system is, you know, a mystery," replied the astronomer. "According to the nebular hypothesis we may imagine that two or more dark suns, perhaps encircled with planets, have come into collision. Burst into atoms by the stupendous shock they would fill the surrounding region with a vast nebula of incandescent ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... other species or some other condition,—so it may be surmised that Variation and Natural Selection have their Struggle and consequent Check, or are limited by something inherent in the constitution of organic beings. We are disposed to rank the derivative hypothesis in its fulness with the nebular hypothesis, and to regard both as allowable, as not unlikely to prove tenable in spite of some strong objections, but as not therefore demonstrably true. Those, if any there be, who regard the derivative hypothesis as satisfactorily proved must have loose notions as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... have at last been recognized as historical documents, ay, as the most ancient documents in the history of the human mind, and as palaeontological records of an evolution that begins to elicit wider and deeper sympathies than the nebular formation of the planet on which we dwell for a season, or the organic development of that ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS, the theory that the sun and planets with their satellites in the solar system were originally one mass of nebulous matter which, gradually cooling and contracting, under violent revolution resolved itself ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... came to me to show me how the universe was created. There was one molecule, which by vibration became—Heaven knows how!—the Sun. Further vibration produced Mercury, and so on. I suspect the nebular hypothesis had got into the poor man's head by reading, in some singular mixture with what it found there. Some modifications of vibration gave heat, electricity, etc. I {14} listened until my informant ceased to vibrate—which is always the shortest way—and then said, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Swedenborg with minute care, there is no doubt. In the "Principia" is a chapter on mosses wherein it is explained how the first vestige of lichen catches the dust particles of disintegrating rock, and we get the first tokens of a coming forest. Darwin never made a point better; and the nebular hypothesis and the origin of species are worked out with conjectures, fanciful flights, queer conceits, poetic comparisons, far-reaching analogies, and most astounding leaps ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... for the first time that remarkable doctrine by which his name is probably most generally known to those readers of astronomical books who are not specially mathematicians. It is in the "Systeme du Monde" that Laplace laid down the principles of the Nebular Theory which, in modern days, has been generally accepted by those philosophers who are competent to judge, as substantially a correct expression of ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... four bright lines. The brightest one is situated in the bluish-green part of the spectrum, and was at first thought to be identical with a line of the spectrum of nitrogen, but subsequent more accurate measures have shown that neither this nor the second nebular line correspond to any dark line in the solar spectrum, nor can they be produced experimentally in the laboratory, and we are therefore unable to ascribe them to any known element. The third and fourth ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... motions are invariable—the first important step in the establishment of the stability of the solar system and one of the most brilliant achievements in celestial mechanics. In his "Exposition du Systeme du Monde" was formulated the theory called the "nebular hypothesis," the glory of which he must share with Kant. "He would have completed the science of the skies," says Fourier, "had the science been capable of completion." As a physicist he made discoveries that were in themselves sufficient to ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... universe plunged it into the chaos from which it was newly created by a process accurately described in Genesis. Rougemont made the earth one of the "morning stars" of Job, reduced to chaos by Lucifer and his followers, and thence developed in accordance with the nebular hypothesis. Kurtz evolved from this theory an opinion that the geological disturbances were caused by the opposition of the devil to the rescue of our universe from chaos by the Almighty. Delitzsch put a similar idea into a more scholastic jargon; but most desperate of all ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... of mechanics paved the way for a definite scientific theory, the so-called "nebular hypothesis," announced by La Place in 1796, and by the philosopher Kant at a still earlier date. Largely through the Newtonian principle of the parallelogram of forces, the present masses, orbits, and velocities were analyzed into a more ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... likeness, the simulacrun, the LEMUR of his shape, not its human and corporeal substance,—as if, like hers, the Intelligence was parted from the Clay,—and as the sun, while it revolves and glows, had cast off into remotest space that nebular image of itself, so the thing of earth, in the action of its more luminous and enduring being, had thrown its likeness into that new-born stranger of the heavens. There stood the phantom,—a phantom ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... clarification of ideas. It is a well-attested fact that when we attempt to explain a thing to someone else, it becomes clearer in our own minds. You can demonstrate this for yourself by attempting to explain to someone an intricate conception such as the nebular hypothesis. The effort involved in making the explanation makes the fact more vivid to you. The habit of thus utilizing your knowledge in conversation is an excellent one to acquire. Indeed, expression is the only objective test of knowledge ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... our quotation from Mr. Herbert Spencer's terse and lucid exposition of the nebular theory, we find this doctrine virtually embodied in the next sentences:—"Eventually this slow movement of the atoms towards their common centre of gravity will bring ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... example: "The Baron von Humboldt will address you this afternoon on the Cosmos." Then in a discourse or lecture of an hour's duration he would give a condensed history of the origin and development of the world. I remember on one occasion he took up the nebular or La Place theory, adopted it as the true one, and traced the rise and progress of the earth through the evolution of matter to its present condition, in a most comprehensive and masterly manner. At another time it was said: "John Quincy Adams will speak to you to-day on the political condition ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... "and I will build the world;" and he proceeds to deduce from the simple data from which he starts, a doctrine in all essential respects similar to the well-known "Nebular Hypothesis" of Laplace.[13] He accounts for the relation of the masses and the densities of the planets to their distances from the sun, for the eccentricities of their orbits, for their rotations, for their satellites, for the general agreement ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... theory were as great achievements in their day as the spectroscope and the nebular hypothesis are in our day. The most useful inventions and the most marvelous products of the human brain are not the railway and telegraph after all. The art of printing, which infinitely multiplies thought and sows it in the very ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... quite so certain that a genetic relation may not underlie the classification of minerals? The inorganic world has not always been what we see it. It has certainly had its metamorphoses, and, very probably, a long "Entwickelungsgeschichte" out of a nebular blastema. Who knows how far that amount of likeness among sets of minerals, in virtue of which they are now grouped into families and orders, may not be the expression of the common conditions to which ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... 1844, Robert Chambers, who was favourably known as the author of some geological papers, wrote a book which excited a great amount of attention—the well-known Vestiges of Creation. This work was a very bold pronouncement of evolutionary views. Beginning with a statement of the nebular hypothesis of Kant and Laplace, it discussed the question of the origin of life—when life became possible on a cooling globe—and, arguing strongly in favour of the view that all plants and animals, as the conditions under ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... THE NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS. It is possible that the earth began as a vaporous, shining sphere, formed by the gathering together of the material of a gaseous ring which had been detached from a cooling and shrinking nebula. Such a ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... such a breakfast! Do you suppose that I would ruin the reputation of my voice in one fell moment? Now what kind of clay led to this remark? Do as your doctor says. Recline on the lounge. Close your eyes. Here is a treatise on the Nebular Hypothesis that looks unintelligible ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... incense thick and sweet, The lovely purpose that aspires, The wraiths of vapor wing'd and fleet That rise and run with eager feet Forth from a myriad altar fires: All these become a mist that fills The vales and chasms nebular; A shaping Soul that moves and thrills The wastes between red star ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis |
