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Shapley's Debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2016

Michael Hoskin
Michael Hoskin*
Affiliation:
Cambridge University

Extract

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The attempt to make three-dimensional sense of the Milky Way goes back to a most unlikely origin: the English antiquary of the early eighteenth century, William Stukeley, remembered today for associating the Druids with Stonehenge. Stukeley came from Lincolnshire and so was a fellow-countryman of Isaac Newton, and as a result he was privileged to talk with the great man from time to time. In his Memoirs of Newton Stukeley records one conversation they had in about 1720, in which Stukeley proposed that the Sun and the brightest stars of the night sky make up what we today would term a globular cluster, and this cluster is surrounded by a gap, outside of which lie the small stars of the Milky Way in the form of a flattened ring.

Type
Chapter I. Review Papers on Harlow Shapley
Information
Symposium - International Astronomical Union , Volume 126: The Harlow-Shapley Symposium on Globular Cluster Systems in Galaxies , 1988 , pp. 3 - 9
Copyright
Copyright © Kluwer 1988 

References

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

I am grateful to Harvard University Archives for access to documents relating to the appointment of a successor to Pickering and for permission to quote. My attention was kindly drawn to these documents by Owen Gingerich and the later paragraphs of this paper have greatly benefited as a result.Google Scholar
The text of Shapley's Washington paper, and of the typed slides summarising Curtis's argument, are reprinted with documentation and archival acknowledgements in Hoskin, M., 1976, J. Hist. Astron. 7, 169. This also appears with other relevant material in Hoskin, M., 1982, Stellar Astronomy: Historical Studies, Science History Publications Ltd, Chalfont St Giles, Bucks, UK. On Stukeley, see Hoskin, M., 1985, J. Hist. Astron. 16, 77. On John Herschel, see Hoskin, M., 1987, ibid. 18, 1. On Kapteyn, see Paul, E.R., ibid. 17, 155. On Shapley, see Shapley, H., 1969, Through Rugged Ways to the Stars, Scribner's Sons, New York, and the article by O. Gingerich in Dictionary of Scientific Biography. On the ‘Debate’ and its background, see Berendzen, R., Hart, R. and Seeley, D., 1976, Man Discovers the Galaxies, Neale Watson Academic Publications, New York, and more especially Smith, R., 1982, The Expanding Universe: Astronomy's ‘Great Debate’ 1900-1931, Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar