An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe 1750: . . . together with the first publication of A Theory of the Universe, 1734.

WRIGHT, Thomas (1711-1786):

ISBN 10: 0356035158 / ISBN 13: 9780356035154

Published by New York: American Elsevier/ London: Macdonald, 1971., 1971

About this Item

xxxviii, 172 pp; 31 plates. Original cloth, 4to. Very Good+, in dust jacket. History of Science Library: Primary Sources. Pp. 3-15 = Hoskin's transcription of Wright 1734. Pp. 16-172 = Wright 1750, reprinted in facsimile [viii, 2 leaves, 82 pp; 31 plates], the title page reprinted in its original black and red (a common style in English scientific books of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as Boyle's Sceptical Chemist or Newton's Principia). Wright's first attempt to effect a reconciliation of his religious and scientific views of the universe 'is found in a manuscript dated 1734 that appears to be the text of a lecture-sermon accompanying a vast visual aid, now lost. In this lecture the divine center (the center in the moral order) was also the gravitational center (the center in the physical order) and thus Wright required the sun and the other stars to be moving in orbit about this center in order to avoid gravitational collapse. He found evidence of this circulation among the stars in Halley's 1718 paper on proper motions (Philosophical Transactions, 30, 736-738), the significance of which had escaped more powerful minds than Wright's. In his efforts to bring home to his audience their precarious moral position, Wright in his visual aid portrayed a cross section of creation, one that passed through the divine center and the solar system. With artistic license he represented the visible portion of the universe as it actually appears to us, beginning with the sun and moon and extending to the Milky Way, which he considered to be the effect of innumerable distant stars in the plane of the cross section. It was only sometime after 1742 that Wright realized that his model of the universe would produce suich a milky way in any of the possible cross sections, whereas the visible Milky Way is unique. In 1750 The Original Theory met this difficulty by making the shell of the stars thin, so that the Milky Way is the plane tangent to the shell at the position occupied by the solar system; because the shell is thin, no milky effect is produced when the observer looks either inward or outward. Alternatively (but with the loss of spherical symmetry), Wright would permit the stars to form a flattened ring, like a large-scale Saturn's ring; the Milky Way was then in the plane of the ring. This latter version, in which the stars lie in a plane and orbit their center as the planets orbit the sun, appealed to Immanuel Kant, who, not realizing that the center of Wright's system was supernatural, credited Wright with originating a disk-shaped model of the galaxy' (Hoskin in D.S.B. XIV: 519). American ISBN: 0444196129.

Seller Inventory # 20811a

Bibliographic Details

• Title: An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe 1750: . . . together with the first publication of A Theory of the Universe, 1734.
• Publisher: New York: American Elsevier/ London: Macdonald, 1971.
• Publication Date: 1971
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0356035158
• ISBN 13: 9780356035154
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Approx 115 pages plus 38 page introduction. A facsimile reprint of the first publication of A Theory of the Universe with introduction by Michael A Hoskin. Green cloth boards with gilt titles to spine in vey good condition. Dustwrapper has edge wear and a 3cm tear to rear cover. Previous owners signature to inside of cover.