The Age of Scientific Naturalism Tyndall and His Contemporaries

About this book

Physicist John Tyndall and his contemporaries were at the forefront of developing the cosmology of scientific naturalism during the Victorian period. They rejected all but physical laws as having any impact on the operations of human life and the universe. Contributors focus on the way Tyndall and his correspondents developed their ideas through letters, periodicals and scientific journals and challenge previously held assumptions about who gained authority, and how they attained and defended their position within the scientific community.

Contents

Introduction: John Tyndall, Scientific Naturalism and Modes of Communication - Michael S Reidy

Part I: John Tyndall
1 Saving the World in the Age of Entropy: John Tyndall and the Second Law of Thermodynamics - Elizabeth Neswald
2 Getting Past the Greenhouse: John Tyndall and the Nineteenth-Century History of Climate Change - Joshua Howe
3 Tyndall, Lewes and Popular Representations of Scientific Authority in Victorian Britain - Jeremiah Rankin and Ruth Barton

Part II: Scientific Naturalism
4 Herbert Spencer and the Metaphysical Roots of Evolutionary Naturalism - Michael Taylor
5 Evolutionary Naturalism and Mathematical Innovation: William Kingdon Clifford's use of Spencerian Evolutionism - Josipa Petrunic
6 William Huggins, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Nature of the Nebulae - Robert W Smith
7 Alfred Newton: The Scientific Naturalist Who Wasn't - Jonathan Smith

Part III: Communicating Science
8 Corresponding Naturalists - Janet Browne
9 Tyndall and Stokes: Correspondence, Referee Reports and the Physical Sciences in Victorian Britain - Melinda Baldwin
10 Science at the Metaphysical Society: Defining Knowledge in the 1870s - Bernard Lightman

Index

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