Mouvement relatif et cosmologie dans l'écriture de la 'Science Nouvelle' en France, 1610–1759 (2018)
Margolin, Arianne (Author)
Braider, Christopher S. (Advisor)
Lojkine, Stéphane (Advisor)
University of Colorado at Boulder
Braider, Christopher S.
Lojkine, Stéphane
Physical Details: 286 pp.
Language: French
L'objectif de ma thèse est d'analyser le rôle que l'expérience de pensée joue dans l'astronomie de la première modernité (1610–1759). J'examine en particulier les problèmes que pose la révolution copernicienne à la physique et à l'astronomie aristotéliciennes, et la façon dont ils se recoupent : celui de l'unité de la nature ; ceux de l'observation à travers la lunette astronomique ; le phénomène du mouvement relatif, comme clef de réinterprétation des observations astronomiques, permettant de faire apparaître les autres planètes du système solaire comme quasiterrestres ; puis, celui de la pluralité des mondes, à la fois comme conséquence logique et comme représentation des moyens par lesquels la « science nouvelle », c'est-à-dire copernicienne, des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, affronte ces problèmes d'observation et de philosophie. La première partie de mon étude est ainsi consacrée à la cosmologie traditionnelle, telle qu'elle s'exprime dans les observations de Galilée et de Johannes Kepler, tandis que la seconde partie étudie la nouvelle cosmologie, à l'oeuvre dans les publications de vulgarisation scientifique d'expression française de René Descartes, Cyrano de Bergerac, Voltaire et la marquise du Châtelet. Dans cette optique, j'analyse en termes physiques, les différentes formes de fiction associées à l'expérience de pensée, notamment le voyage imaginaire, employées par ces auteurs dans leur tentative d'interprétation des nouvelles observations astronomiques et de dépassement des limites technologiques et optiques imposées par la lunette. L'expérience de pensée s'impose alors comme la seule méthode capable de surmonter ces difficultés, permettant à l'auteur comme au lecteur de voyager (et de spéculer) sur des mondes ressemblant au leur, et d'explorer un univers copernicien.Alternate abstract:My dissertation focuses on the role that thought experiment played in early modern astronomy. More specifically, I examine the intersecting problems posed for physics and astronomy in tandem by the Copernican Revolution: the problem of the unity of nature; the problems of observation surrounding the telescope; the phenomenon of relative motion as a key to reinterpreting observational data; and the problem of the plurality of worlds as at once a logical consequence and a symbol of the ways in which the "New Science" of seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Copernicanism challenged traditional cosmology within the works of the observers Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, which I present in the first section, and the French popularizers René Descartes, Cyrano de Bergerac, Voltaire, and the marquise du Châtelet in the second. My particular focus is on the thought experiment in the physical sense of the term and the various forms of fiction associated with it, stemming from my exploration of the limits natural philosophers and astronomers encountered in their efforts to make sense of their observational data—limits imposed by their increasing awareness of the optical as well as technical deficiencies of the observational instruments available to them, as by the lamentable fact that they lacked the means to make the voyages necessary to perform direct empirical inspection of extraterrestrial "worlds." Thought experiment thus emerged as the only means of performing the kind of experiments they believed were needed to refine as well as settle the relational issues the Copernican Revolution raised.
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