In science, William Herschel (1738-1822) was German-born English astronomer, a Simmons 100 (#27) and Cattell 1000 (#78), noted for his studies and theories of stars and heat in respect to life.
Nebular hypothesis
Herschel is said to have arrived at the nebular hypothesis as an explanation of many phenomena he observed among stars.
Heat | Life
In 1795, Herschel stated the following: [3]
“That the emission of light must waste the sun, is not a difficulty that can be opposed to our hypothesis. Many of the operations of Nature are carried on in her great laboratory which we cannot comprehend. Perhaps the many telescopic comets may restore to the sun what is lost by the emission of light.”
Herschel would go on, somewhere, to assert that the sun’s heat is responsible for life and for most geological evolution on earth. His work, supposedly, influenced Charles Darwin and his 1859 calculation of the age of the earth of 300-million-years. [1]
Extraterrestrial life debate
Herschel, in some way, was involved in the so-called the "extraterrestrial life debate", which ran from 1750 to 1900, regarding the existence or nonexistence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, involving thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, Percival Lowell, among others, an idea which supposedly was crouched with embroiled tensions with religion, supposedly because the possibility of life beyond earth, conflicted with the seven-days of creation view of the Bible, the earth being at the center of the universe, with God creating vegetable life on day three, animal life on day five, and human life (in his likeness) on day six. [2]
Blue sky problem
Herschel is said to have worked on the blue sky problem with respect to the 90 degree polarization data.
References
1. Age of the sun (2014) – NobelPrize.org.
2. Crowe, Michael J. (1986). The Extraterrestrial Life Debate. CUP archive.
3. Herschel, William. (1795). “Nature and Construction of the Sun and Fixed Stars” (Ѻ), Publication; in: Life and Works (§4). Publisher.
External links
● William Herschel – Wikipedia.
