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Nebular   Listen
adjective
Nebular  adj.  Of or pertaining to nebulae; of the nature of, or resembling, a nebula.
Nebular hypothesis, an hypothesis to explain the process of formation of the stars and planets, presented in various forms by Kant, Herschel, Laplace, and others. As formed by Laplace, it supposed the matter of the solar system to have existed originally in the form of a vast, diffused, revolving nebula, which, gradually cooling and contracting, threw off, in obedience to mechanical and physical laws, succesive rings of matter, from which subsequently, by the same laws, were produced the several planets, satellites, and other bodies of the system. The phrase may indicate any hypothesis according to which the stars or the bodies of the solar system have been evolved from a widely diffused nebulous form of matter.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Nebular" Quotes from Famous Books



... telescope), and these particular stars are veiled from sight behind the strange mists. Running in all directions across the relatively open spaces are nebulous wisps and streaks of the most curious forms. On some of the nebular lines, which are either straight throughout, or if they change direction do so at an angle, little stars are strung like beads. In one case seven or eight stars are thus aligned, and, as if to emphasize their dependence upon the chain which connects ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss

... furnish the best natural solution of the origin of the planetary and stellar worlds? Is the nebular hypothesis likely to win an established place in science? Matson, ...
— Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Debate Index - Second Edition • Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

... the details of nature goes, and I can think of no invention or discovery that can be directly traced to anything in their peculiar thought, for neither with Berkeley's tar-water nor with Kant's nebular hypothesis had their respective philosophic tenets anything to do. The satisfactions they yield to their disciples are intellectual, not practical; and even then we have to confess that there is a large minus-side ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James

... our psychical life, between the state of dream and the state of waking. Such may have been the condition of life in our nebula before the condensation of matter was complete, if it be true that life springs forward at the very moment when, as the effect of an inverse movement, the nebular ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... cosmic evolution—the theory which in former times was generally known as the nebular hypothesis—that the heavenly bodies were formed by the slow contraction of heated nebulous masses, is indicated by so many facts that it seems scarcely possible to doubt it except on the theory that ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb

... consideration of the features of the solar system. We had before us in the sun and planets obviously not a haphazard aggregation of bodies, but a system resting upon a multitude of relations pointing to a common physical cause. From these considerations Kant and Laplace formulated the nebular hypothesis, resting it on gravitation alone, for at that time the science of the conservation of energy was practically unknown. These philosophers showed how, on the supposition that the space now occupied by the solar system was once filled by a vaporous mass, the formation of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various

... is no Ultima Thule in the progress of science. With the recent augmentations of telescopic power, the details of the nebular theory, proposed by Sir W. Herschell with such courage and ingenuity, have been drawn in question. Many—most—of those milky patches in which he beheld what he regarded as cosmical matter, as yet in an unformed state,—the rudimental ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett

... tidal evolution in our solar system has also to be viewed in connection with the celebrated nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system. Of course it would be understood that tidal evolution is in no sense a rival doctrine to that of the nebular theory. The nebular origin of the sun and the planets ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball

... cosmic, cosmical[obs3]; mundane, terrestrial, terrestrious|, terraqueous[obs3], terrene, terreous|, telluric, earthly, geotic[obs3], under the sun; sublunary[obs3], subastral[obs3]. solar, heliacal[obs3]; lunar; celestial, heavenly, sphery[obs3]; starry, stellar; sidereal, sideral[obs3]; astral; nebular; uranic. Adv. in all creation, on the face of the globe, here below, under the sun. Phr. die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltergesicht[Ger]; "earth is but the frozen echo of the silent voice of God" [Hageman]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... history of religious thought—that is, of the infantile vagaries of the human mind—is full of puerilites. There is hardly an absurdity which learned divines have not debated as seriously as scientists discuss the nebular hypothesis or the evolution theory. They have argued how many angels could dance on the point of a needle; whether Adam had a navel; whether ghosts and demons could cohabit with women; whether animals could sin; and what was ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote



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