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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



... irrefragable dogmas which the mind drops as futile and fruitless. It is recorded of Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, that it found reception from no physician then over forty years old. We believe the splendid nebular construction of Laplace has its own difficulties; yet what noble or aspiring mind does not find interior warranties for the truth of that audacious synthesis? Is it that the soul darts responsive impartments to the heavens? that the whirl is elemental in the mind? that baffling intervals ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... is quite sufficient to demonstrate that the work must be much later than 1406, though whether immediately before or after the second Roman visit must be founded on hypothesis. The precise date of the particular decoration is too nebular to permit any exact statement on the subject. There was never any line of demarcation between one school and another. One can find Gothic ideas long after the Renaissance had established its principles,[52] while the period of transition lasted so long, especially in the smaller towns, ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

... growing anxious about his future, was thus placed in a trying situation will be seen at once. The chance of a lifetime was there and he was unable to seize it. Everyone knew that by these small condensations of nebular promise stars were eventually evolved, and to have at his disposal ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King

... special types or forms, from four or five remote primordial forms, or perhaps from one? We accept the theory of gravitation because it explains all the facts we know, and bears all the tests that we can put it to. We incline to accept the nebular hypothesis, for similar reasons; not because it is proved,—thus far it is wholly incapable of proof,—but because it is a natural theoretical deduction from accepted physical laws, is thoroughly congruous with the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... it is now; our year with the solstices and equinoxes as its cardinal points. The texture of our poetry might conceivably be the poorer without its star spangles; our philosophy, for the want of a nebular hypothesis. These would be the main differences. Yet, to those who indulge in speculative dreaming, how much smaller life would be with a sun and a moon and a blue beyond for the only visible, the only thinkable universe. And it is, we repeat, from ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... relation may not underlie the classification of minerals? The inorganic world has not always been what we see it. It has certainly had its metamorphoses, and, very probably, a long "Entwickelungsgeschichte" out of a nebular blastema. Who knows how far that amount of likeness among sets of minerals, in virtue of which they are now grouped into families and orders, may not be the expression of the common conditions to which that particular patch ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley

... (1749-1827): a celebrated French astronomer and mathematician. He is best known for his theory of the formation of the planetary systems, the so-called "nebular hypothesis." Until recently this hypothesis has generally been accepted in its main outlines. It is now being supplanted by the "Spiral Nebular Hypothesis" developed by Professors Moulton and Chamberlin ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... said I; "he has promised to print my essay on the nebular hypothesis of Professor Lecouvrier as soon as his contract with the monometallist college professors expires. He is one of the most ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... of Epicurus; and since, when we discussed this subject not very long ago, I mentioned to you how singularly, yet with how little notice, the vague guesses of that noble Greek had met with confirmation in the late nebular cosmogony, I felt that you could not avoid casting your eyes upward to the great nebula in Orion, and I certainly expected that you would do so. You did look up; and I was now assured that I had correctly followed your steps. But in that bitter tirade upon Chantilly, which appeared ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... then that went to wreck? That is a thing more easy to ask than to answer. At least, for my own part, I complain that some vagueness hangs over all the accounts of the nebular hypothesis. However, in this place a brief ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... their simultaneous aggregation here and there. And in the nebulous wreaths situated amidst the stars there is evidence that these actually originated where they now are, for in such no relative motion, I believe, has as yet been detected by the spectroscope. All this, too, is in keeping with the nebular hypothesis of Kant and Laplace so long as this does not assume a primitive infinite dispersion of matter, but the gathering of matter from finite distances first into nebulous patches which aggregating ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... more wicked for free-thinkers to deny it, than for priests to deny the doctrine of evolution, or the dynamic theory of heat? Why should we be damned for laughing at Samson and his foxes, while others, holding the nebular hypothesis in utter contempt, go straight ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll

... that simple people are interested in large and vital subjects, and the Hull-House residents themselves at one time, with only partial success, undertook to give a series of lectures on the history of the world, beginning with the nebular hypothesis and reaching Chicago itself in the twenty-fifth lecture! Absurd as the hasty review appears, there is no doubt that the beginner in knowledge is always eager for the general statement, as those wise old teachers of the people well knew, when ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... simulacrun, the LEMUR of his shape, not its human and corporeal substance,—as if, like hers, the Intelligence was parted from the Clay,—and as the sun, while it revolves and glows, had cast off into remotest space that nebular image of itself, so the thing of earth, in the action of its more luminous and enduring being, had thrown its likeness into that new-born stranger of the heavens. There stood the phantom,—a phantom Mejnour, by its side. ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton



Words linked to "Nebular" :   uranology, nebular hypothesis, nebula, nebulous



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