The mule on the Mount Wilson trail: George Ellery Hale, American scientific cosmology, and cosmologies of American science
The mule on the Mount Wilson trail: George Ellery Hale, American scientific cosmology, and cosmologies of American science
This article explores the relation between two different modes of cosmology: the social and the scientific. Over the twentieth century, scientific understandings of the dimensions and operations of the physical universe changed dramatically, significantly prompted by astronomical and astrophysical research undertaken at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. Could those understandings be readily translated into social theory? Studies across a range of disciplines have intimated that the scientific cosmos might be less essential to the worlds of meaning and belonging that people and communities compose around themselves than more local and relational models of an ordered whole. The article applies that proposition to the Mount Wilson Observatory itself, arguing that the observatory’s founder, George Ellery Hale, and his acolytes were deeply invested in practices of terrestrial place-making, the politics of belonging, and the cadences of civilizational time as applied to their city and its region. Moreover, they struggled to construct a philosophy integrating the cosmos they were seeking to fix at home with the contortions and careering trajectories of the universal whole.
Edwin Hubble, George Ellery Hale, Mount Wilson Observatory, Pasadena, Walter Adams, expanding universe, scientific cosmology
144-71
Oliver, Kendrick
928f8050-9c38-47a8-9121-1f60437dfc1e
6 July 2023
Oliver, Kendrick
928f8050-9c38-47a8-9121-1f60437dfc1e
Oliver, Kendrick
(2023)
The mule on the Mount Wilson trail: George Ellery Hale, American scientific cosmology, and cosmologies of American science.
History of Science, 62 (1), .
(doi:10.1177/00732753231179330).
Abstract
This article explores the relation between two different modes of cosmology: the social and the scientific. Over the twentieth century, scientific understandings of the dimensions and operations of the physical universe changed dramatically, significantly prompted by astronomical and astrophysical research undertaken at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. Could those understandings be readily translated into social theory? Studies across a range of disciplines have intimated that the scientific cosmos might be less essential to the worlds of meaning and belonging that people and communities compose around themselves than more local and relational models of an ordered whole. The article applies that proposition to the Mount Wilson Observatory itself, arguing that the observatory’s founder, George Ellery Hale, and his acolytes were deeply invested in practices of terrestrial place-making, the politics of belonging, and the cadences of civilizational time as applied to their city and its region. Moreover, they struggled to construct a philosophy integrating the cosmos they were seeking to fix at home with the contortions and careering trajectories of the universal whole.
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The mule on the Mount Wilson trail - HoS revision
- Accepted Manuscript
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oliver-2023-the-mule-on-the-mount-wilson-trail-george-ellery-hale-american-scientific-cosmology-and-cosmologies-of
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More information
Accepted/In Press date: 12 May 2023
e-pub ahead of print date: 6 July 2023
Published date: 6 July 2023
Additional Information:
Funding Information: the author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research for this article was made possible by a month-long Dibner History of Science Fellowship at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California (2013).
Keywords:
Edwin Hubble, George Ellery Hale, Mount Wilson Observatory, Pasadena, Walter Adams, expanding universe, scientific cosmology
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 478643
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/478643
ISSN: 0073-2753
PURE UUID: ecd209d1-6fc4-4bfc-a426-98627202eb10
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Date deposited: 06 Jul 2023 16:40
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 02:43
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