Comets, Cosmology and the Big Bang by Allan Chapman

Author:Allan Chapman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lion Hudson Limited
Published: 2018-10-04T16:00:00+00:00

POPULAR ASTRONOMY IN FRANCE

Camille Flammarion was no less a product of great discoveries, public curiosity, mass markets, and commercial opportunities than were his British contemporaries Richard Anthony Proctor and Sir Robert Stawell Ball. Born in 1825 into a commercial publishing family that would become the Groupe Flammarion, Camille was, like his French contemporary Jules Verne, captivated by the new power of science and technology, and by tracing through its imaginative possibilities. The author of several dozen popular books, he explored ideas such as life on other worlds, cosmology, and spiritualism. Did the souls of the dead “transmigrate”, perhaps even to other planets, and could the tails of comets have deleterious effects upon life on earth? While not concerned with fundamental astronomical research, Flammarion owned a private observatory from which he appears to have enjoyed looking at the heavens. In 1887, he founded the Société Astronomique de France, and also helped to set up its published Bulletin, establishing astronomy as a serious hobby in the French-speaking world, just as was happening north of the Channel. A similar movement was under way in the USA, bringing about the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1889. All of these societies, be they British, French, or American, shared an essentially middle-class membership. But there was also a significant body of working men (so far, I have found no working women, unlike their better-off sisters) who devoted a significant amount of time and energy to astronomy.

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