The Permanent ‘Becoming’ of the Cosmos: On Experiencing the Time Dimension of Astronomical Entities in the 18th Century. ‐ This paper deals with two of the initial stages through which the dimension of time, in the sense of an irreversible development, found its way into astronomical‐cosmological thinking. The one resulted from the first consequental application of Newtonian principles and laws to cosmic entities outside of our solar system found in the General Natural History or Theory of the Heavens of Immanuel (...) Kant (1755): Endeavoring to explain through natural causes first the peculiarities of the solar system, no longer naturally explainable through the celestial mechanics of Isaac Newton (such as the common orbital plane and rotational direction of all the members of the solar system and the distribution of the masses) ‐ which, however, had been deducible in Johannes Keplers Weltharmonik ‐, and endeavoring secondly to explain above all the beginning of the inertial movement of all discrete heavenly bodies ‐ which, however, could have been derived from René Descartes's vortex theory ‐ without using arbitrary acts of God as Newton had done, Kant had to introduce an initial state in which matter in the form of atoms was equally and almost homogeneously distributed over the whole space (similar to the permanent state in Descartes's theory). Thereupon, according to Kant, the initial movements of the slowly growing masses resulted from the effect of gravitational forces. The parameters within the solar system which had to be explained, could then be easily deduced from the process of mass concentration at different points and from the resulting vortex movements. ‐ The other initial stage is found in the classification of ‘nebulae’ by William Herschel who introduced the historical time factor, in the above‐mentioned sense, as a principle of order in addition to the outward shape, which had become common for all the different elements in natural history during the second half of the 18th century. Thereupon the different shapes of the nebulae could be interpreted as stages of development from the primordial nebular state to multiple or single stars. (Herschel had not yet considered them to be accumulations of stars for lack of a suitable telescope.)Both initial stages, which arose out of the thinking of the second half of the 18th century, were still premature for astronomy and cosmology; they have only been taken up again since the end of the 19th century as a result of the emergence of astrophysics, which provided the empirical data for the earlier speculations and conclusions from analogy. (shrink)

Il y a déjà quelque temps que l’intérêt de Kant pour les sciences exactes a été réévalué à sa juste mesure. Gustave Milhaud, dans un article intitulé « Kant comme savant » datant de 1895, soulignait déjà que, à en juger au nombre considérable de publications scientifiques touchant à la physique, la géologie, la minéralogie, la géogonie, la cosmologie et la géographie physique entre 1747 et 1758, dans...