Innovatory advances by outsiders: The example of the amateur astronomer William Herschel. — Every scientific experience and perception has been gained from within a particular historical situation constituted by numerous components, both internal and external to a particular science, called praesentabilia (Präsentabilien). They enable and determine the scope and the experiental pale of any given science as well as its way and method of acquiring experience and knowledge. The interaction of such praesentabilia forms, what may be called the Historische Erfahrungsraum (...) (‘historical field of experience’), which each individual and/or (greater/smaller) group shares in respectively. A scientific (cultural, religious, social, disciplinal, etc.) community may be said to exist whereever the intersection of the various sets of praesentabilia making up its members' fields of experience comprises a minimum standard of praesentabilia that form this community, thus establishing its particular Historische(n) Erfahrungsraum. As long and as far someone outside the disciplinal community could acquaint himself with its praesentabilia in a selftaught manner, there will be outsiders and amateurs, who, while lacking any regular (and one‐sided) education and training, yet owning some extra praesentabilia, would be in a position to bring in novel methods of thinking and unconventional perceptions. There may be several reasons for this: (1) because they study fields that are not yet or no longer present in the disciplinal community, or (2) because they are not bound to the usual (uniform and standardized) instrumentation, or (3) because their social status does not seem from the professional scientific community (nor from the socio‐political community, conditional to the former's existence). Conversely they feel not being bound by the rules, the expectations and the aims posited by that scientific community. Since the disciplinal community lacks the praesentabilia that are prerequisite to fully understanding the outsider and amateur, he, in turn, has to overcome much more difficulties, till his innovatory perceptions are acknowledged. On the other hand, whenever his new methods, instruments or points of view prove to be helpful in solving an old problem of the disciplinal community, this solution will generally soon be acknowledged, in case its reproduction is sufficiently guaranteed by the traditional methods and by the usual instruments. Eventually the acknowledgement may lead to the approbation and the acceptance of the said methods, instruments and points of view, because the solution offered has by then become a praesentabile integral to the disciplinal community.The life and career of an outsider and amateur, like William Herschel, is a good instance of a whole range of potentialities of such innovatory advances. Considering these points, the paper deals with several aspects of Herschel's work: his new method of reviewing the heavens (Himmelsdurchmusterung) linked to his novel telescopes, — his discovery of the planet Uranus, — his discovery and verification of the existence of physical double stars, — his assumption of historicity and development of cosmic objects, — his determining the shape of the Milky Way by means of a primary method of stellar statistics, ‐ his discovery and determination of the sun's peculiar motion, ‐ and his discovery of the infra‐red radiant heat continuing the spectrum of the visible light. (shrink)

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)