Meyer, Michal (Author)
University of Florida
Physical Details: 348 pp.
Language: English
Mary Somerville (1780-1872) established her public reputation as a mathematician in Britain and the United States in the early 1830s with the publication of Mechanism of the Heavens (1831). From her position as a member of elite scientific circles, Somerville launched into writing about the sciences for an educated audience at a time when science was considered part of the broader culture. Taken together, her books, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), Physical Geography (1848), and On Molecular and Microscopic Science (1869) covered a broad scientific terrain. Somerville kept her work up to date with the help of a network of scientific friends and acquaintances. This dissertation examines how Somerville's science incorporated and reflected cultural assumptions and issues of the day, from fears about social stability to the role of the empire, from the status of animals to political economy. This science as communication also carried aesthetic and religious values. In Mechanism of the Heavens, Somerville coated Pierre-Simon Laplace's celestial mechanics with natural theology, thus making Newton's legacy safe for a British audience worried by French radicalism. Physical Geography was a book made for empire that incorporated the knowledge of those who were expanding the empire's physical boundaries as well as its knowledge boundaries. Physical Geography also showcased how science, commerce, and nature were connected against the backdrop of empire. Underlying much of Somerville's work was her faith in progress, which was guaranteed by the same determinism that kept the planets on their course, which were in turn part of the law-like processes of nature guaranteed by God.
...MoreDescription Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. : doc. no. 3416707.
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