As the volume’s subtitle suggests, our essays address Victorian science at the “limits of knowledge,” and Tamara Ketabgian’s essay approaches this subject at the very outer limit of the knowable universe. She examines the popular and controversial treatise The Unseen Universe by the Victorian physicists Balfour Stewart and Peter Gutherie Tait, a work that claimed the second law of thermodynamics provided evidence of another universe being fueled by the entropic waste of our own. Ketabgian argues that this work updated and recast the tropes of natural theology in order to critique science’s growing association with secular materialism, thereby mounting an important critique of the way science was conceptualized. She claims that by recasting scientific laws as generalizations, and hypotheses as acts of imagination, Stewart and Tait showed that science as practice is always, in some sense, a heuristic fiction. (From Introduction, page 12)
...MoreBook Lara Pauline Karpenko; Shalyn Rae Claggett (2016) Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age.
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