Originally Posted by Coldcreation

With the 18th century work of Herschel, Laplace, and the ensuing efforts of 19th century astronomers, both theoretical and observational cosmology crossed the threahold of a new era. The discovery of a supernova in the Andromeda nebula (1880's) came as a surprise to some, to others it was confirmation of what they had suspected all along: Our galaxy was not unique. Immanuel Kant had written about this possibility in his influential Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755).

Following suggestions from a certain Mr. Wright of Duram__who regarded the fixed stars as a system with the greatest resemblance to that of the planets, rather than a randomly scattered swarm__Kant wrote of the stars in our Milky Way as forming a circular plane. Furthermore he wrote "I consider the species of nebulous stars, of which De Maupertuis makes mention in his treatise "On the Figure of the Fixed Stars" which present the form of more or less open elipses: and I easily persuade myself that these stars can be nothing else than a mass of many fixed stars...And I further saw that that, on account of their feeble light, they are removed to an inconceivable distance from us."

[snip]

"We see that at immense distances there are more of such star-systems, and that the creation in all the infinite extent of its vastness is everywhere systematic and related in all its members...The plan of their revelation must therfore, like themselves, be infinite and without bounds." Kant, 1755)

Kant was 31 years old when he wrote what is often credited to E. Hubble: the discovery that galaxies (nebula) are star systems that lie beyond the Milky Way, and thus enlarging our view of the heavens.

Hubble, Einstein, de Sitter (and others) were almost certainly familliar with Kant's theory (which by the way introduced several aspects of what would later find its way into relativistic cosmology, from SR to the big bang: He had written about "the power of expansion poportional to the heat...the most violent conflagration...the most volatile matter" with obvious Newtonian influence). M. Friedman noted that reference to the Kantian framework was almost necessary arbitration in all debate of the foundations of physical science up until the early 1930's.

I don't recall seeing one equation in Kant's seminal work(s).

Originally Posted by Tensor

Which may explain why we don't use the whole of Kant's ideas anymore. Those parts that we do use, have survived primarialy due to numerical analysis showing (and expanding on Kant's original idea) how that idea matches observations better than another idea.

Originally Posted by Nereid

This is a great example!

Kant wrote down an idea, a story; Kant was a philosopher, and he was not doing astronomy.

When historians trace the origin of successful (modern) theories, they invariably find (or make up) plausible stories to tell about how the ideas which became the theories began far back in time. They also usually find that there are many fathers - the ideas which became the theories (in the historians' stories) grew in certain (social, political, scientific, ...) environments, etc.

What we rarely see are all the orphans - the ideas which didn't make it, which weren't able to make some kind of paternity claim. Perhaps Kant wrote a hundred other ideas in that seminal work, none of which you could quote, because there are no successful theories you could claim are the descendants of those (failed) ideas?

A more nuanced view: there are parts of the Kant quote which, interpreted today, are wrong ("and that the creation in all the infinite extent of its vastness is everywhere systematic and related in all its members...The plan of their revelation must therfore, like themselves, be infinite and without bounds.") - it is contradicted by Olbers' paradox, for example (though Kant was already dead by the time Olbers wrote this). Perhaps Kant knew this (but chose to write it anyway)?

In my telling of the story of astronomy, the Kantian ideas (above) are not astronomy - they are not quantitative. However, if some equivalent were to be written today, we should expect that they be quantified before being given serious scrutiny. Why? Many reasons, but one obvious one is that it is so much easier to turn a story into something quantitative (at least to the OOM level) and (in principle) testable than it was 250 years ago - you can teach yourself the necessary math, from online courses (for example), and (possibly) for free! And the high quality data ...

Originally Posted by Coldcration

Thank you.Here I do not agree with your mainstream view. I agree with the Kantian assessment; "infinite and without bounds" (though what he meant by the plan of their revelation is unclear).

(Off topic it is certainly, but since you brought it up, Olbers paradox is irrelevent if another interpretation for redshift z turns out to be viable. In short, a stationary infinite universe should not be ruled out because of the paradox. Hint: Perhaps the subject of an interesting new thread).Good points. Another possibility is for those with ideas to associate themselves or work with mathematicians, physicists. The difficulty there is obvious though. It's like a rock band, everyone has their own ideas about how the music should sound.

Originally Posted by Nereid

OK, so to turn up the contrast, how is this kind of poring over the words of Kant any different from reading tea leaves or the entrails of a sacrificial goat?

Or, to put it another way, maybe Kant was merely an intermediary - the astronomy he did (as recorded in his works) is due to what he ate and drank?

Originally Posted by Coldcreation

From a quantatative perspective, the mainstream view of creation__and the subsequent mythical steps that are thought to have led to the present-day astronomical structures of the universes__is merely an act of transubstantiation (in vino veritas) in which the matter-antimatter asymmetry created the CMBR (and a few light elements).

Kant was an luminary. You may be right though. If he were around today he might just be posting here at ATM, qualitatively hand waving. He was correct in his predictions that nebulae were star systems (galaxies) and therefor that the visible universe was much larger than previously thought; for this he is recognised. Not bad.What ever it was, he must have done more than just eat and drink, he inhaled.

Originally Posted by Nereid

You mean he was lucky?

If he'd guessed otherwise, we wouldn't be having this discussion, right?

Or, more generally, do the people who win the lottery have some special system (for picking winning lottery numbers)?

Or perhaps we could work out the number of teeth a horse has, by sitting around inside, in armchairs, and chatting?

Originally Posted by hhEb09'1

You think Kant just made up random thoughts, and the reason that we remember him was just that he got lucky, and happened to be right? Is that a fair paraphrase?

Originally Posted by Nereid

Not at all ... what I'm saying is that Kant had no way of knowing how well - or how poorly - his ideas matched any 'reality' that he had not tested (through quantitative observation and experiment), especially those aspects of 'reality' which he could not possibly have tested, at the time he lived.

In this sense, his 'astronomy' is/was equivalent to that of the Greeks who tried to determine the number of teeth a horse has, by sitting around discussing it (rather than go outside, open a horse's mouth, and count them).

Further, as I mentioned earlier, when we view the past in the way CC has done - selective quotes from the whole body of (Kant's) work - we are like the folk who say there is something special about Homo sapiens (other than that individuals of this species are making these notes!) in that we are the goal, or best result, (or something) of evolution ... at the time of any of our ancestors, could a prediction have been made as to which species (contemporary with that ancestor of ours) would end up evolving into a species contemporary with Homo sap. (and which would be 'the end of the line')? Similarly, of all of Kant's works, which ideas ended up being somehow prescient (to our eyes)? And which are no longer cited, by even historians of science? And of all the (non-quantitative) ideas, how many require what sort of (revisionist?) interpretation, to make them appear pertinent (today)?

Originally Posted by hhEb09'1

What he did try to do was extend Newton's laws beyond the solar system, to see what the implications were. That's similar to what we do today, with our inferences about dark matter, so I'm still wondering what problem you have with that.

Worse, I've always got the impression that you'd like to suppress all such speculation on this board. I disagree with that wholeheartedly.Equivalent? Like Kant could walk into the field somewhere and examine a nebula close up?I get the sense that you are making up theories about Kant without looking into the horse's mouth.

Originally Posted by dgruss23

I just re-read Kant's entire essay ( found here but you have to do a lot of skimming to find the relevant section) in which he proposes the concept of external galaxies. You're actually going to stand by the notion that what he wrote was not science?You're making a fundamental error here - you cannot apply today's standards to past thinkers - they must be judged based upon their own time period (see many a Stephen Jay Gould essay for further discussion).

Are you going to stand by this notion that what Kant wrote was not astronomy in his time?Have you read his essay? After outlining his hypothesis he states the following:It seems that Kant had a pretty good idea of what the observations of the time had to say regarding his hypothesis! But how was Kant to know anything about how his idea might hold up to future observations? How can any scientist? The point of developing a hypothesis is to develop an idea that future observations might test. Kant seemed to understand this quite well:That's not science?

Originally Posted by Robert Tulip

As one new to BAUT, I have read this thread to get a sense of some of your perspectives, and have some responses to share.

Astronomy is quantitative, but must be placed in a qualitative framework. This is what Immanuel Kant meant when he said 'the starry heavens above and the moral law within' form the twin pillars of the human ability to combine reason and observation. The comment (#107) that "Reality would seem to be top down order and bottom up phenomenology" touches on this problem of how astronomy links to the rest of life. Mathematical astronomy addresses the 'top down order' but how does mathematics apply to phenomena?

Kant sought to answer this by relating the new Copernican mathematics to a sense of human perspective - using astronomy for philosophy to produce a theory of duty. For this he was reviled by the church as the all-destroyer and epitome of atheism, and became the central thinker of the European Enlightenment.

Astronomers also recoil from this Kantian project, but more because his effort to reconcile science with morality (what I call perspectivalism) tries to integrate mathematics with a qualitative endeavour of defining duty, and thereby retains the taint of non-quantitative approaches.

However, it can be argued that sticking to mathematics alone leaves astronomers without a perspective, except perhaps the cosmological perspective of the whole universe.

You might be surprised how wide is Kant's influence, grounded in the scientific knowledge of his day, on fields such as law, psychology and politics. The enlightenment stamp he put on these fields was firmly grounded in Newtonian physics.

Robert Tulip

Originally Posted by Coldcreation

Here is a text from the last section of the link above: Kant's Universal Natural History, with respect to Thomas Wright, from who Kant was inspired:

Originally Posted by dgruss23

Yes, I disagree with the claim that Kant was not doing science, but just telling a story.

Originally Posted by Coldcreation

The reason for bringing Kant into the discussion in the first place, here, was precisely because his writings are a clear and blatent violation of the entire premise set out in the OP of this thread: that without math, you are not doing physics (which includes astronomy, cosmology, etc.)...

To date, it seems Nereid had dodged the Kant factor, albeit artfully (with adjectives like lucky, lottery, something Kant ate, drank, smoked... or 'that was then, I'm talking about now,' etc).

I'm still eagerly awaiting his response to your inquiry...

Originally Posted by dgruss23

In response to that post Nereid said this:I think the quotes taken directly from Kant's writing showed this statement to be wrong here . A direct question was asked in the course of rebutting Nereid's claim about Kant.

Is anyone prepared to defend the claim that Kant was not doing science? Or shall it be conceded that such a statement is incorrect?

Originally Posted by ToSeek

If someone made a conjecture similar to Kant's, we would expect him to back it up with observation and analysis.

Originally Posted by Disinfo Agent

I didn't know about all those things, but I do remember hearing that Kant was the first to propose the "primordial solar nebula hypothesis" by which we currently explain the formation of the planets.

He was a clever guy, even if his philosophical works are a chore to read. And an honest philosopher too, not a quack like so many who claimed to follow his footsteps.


That shows that Kant had good "instincts", but I'm guessing it was Hubble who first came up with some semblance of evidence in support of that theory.

Originally Posted by Coldcreation

Hubble discovered a variable star (as I recall) in a distant 'nebula' but the supernova discovery years earlier in the Andromeda nebula, 1880's was already evidence enough.

Originally Posted by Ken G

And another general measure for this sort of thing is to ask, "if Kant had never been born, how many extra years would it have taken astronomy to reach the understanding it has today?" The way scientific progress has accelerated with modern technology, that one is probably a particularly sobering metric! Or a somewhat different question is, what service did Kant do for his followers by giving them a correct picture of nebulae, in the absence of proof, versus just some other equally satisfying but incorrect picture?

Originally Posted by Ken G

Probably not! If one chooses to use the "accelerated advancement" metric to gauge the importance of Kant's contribution to science, chances are it strongly favors those who contributed to technology over those who contributed to ideas. And if one uses the "how many people were rescued from an incorrect picture" metric, one would need to quantify the harm in having an incorrect picture!