Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




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








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Nebular" Quotes from Famous Books



... NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS, the theory that the sun and planets with their satellites in the solar system were originally one mass of nebulous matter which, gradually cooling and contracting, under violent revolution resolved itself into ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... utterly unconscious "nebulae" evoked the mystery of personality than it is for us to show how the primordial existence of personality demands at the very start some sort of material or bodily expression, whether of a nebular ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... do," 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

... entirely foreign to the problem of human fate. When seeking to solve the question of human destiny, we are to study the facts and prophecies of human nature, and to conclude accordingly. It is a perversion of reason to bring from far an induction of nebular magnitudes to crush with their brute weight the plain indications of the spirit of humanity. What though the number of telescopic worlds were raised to the ten thousandth power, and each orb were as large as all ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... THE NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS. It is possible that the earth began as a vaporous, shining sphere, formed by the gathering together of the material of a gaseous ring which had been detached from a cooling and shrinking nebula. ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... Natural Selection have their Struggle and consequent Check, or are limited by something inherent in the constitution of organic beings. We are disposed to rank the derivative hypothesis in its fulness with the nebular hypothesis, and to regard both as allowable, as not unlikely to prove tenable in spite of some strong objections, but as not therefore demonstrably true. Those, if any there be, who regard the derivative hypothesis as satisfactorily ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... would say, for example: "The Baron von Humboldt will address you this afternoon on the Cosmos." Then in a discourse or lecture of an hour's duration he would give a condensed history of the origin and development of the world. I remember on one occasion he took up the nebular or La Place theory, adopted it as the true one, and traced the rise and progress of the earth through the evolution of matter to its present condition, in a most comprehensive and masterly manner. At another time it was said: "John Quincy Adams will speak to you to-day ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various

... Moreover, the rich Renaissance decoration 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 ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

... star, consisting merely of three or four bright lines. The brightest one is situated in the bluish-green part of the spectrum, and was at first thought to be identical with a line of the spectrum of nitrogen, but subsequent more accurate measures have shown that neither this nor the second nebular line correspond to any dark line in the solar spectrum, nor can they be produced experimentally in the laboratory, and we are therefore unable to ascribe them to any known element. The third and fourth lines were at once seen to be identical with the two hydrogen lines which ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... often premature, composed of half-truths, were mingled with glaring errors and fantastic misconceptions, but were none the less germinal. Leibnitz was the first to propose the nebular hypothesis, which was more fully elaborated by Kant and Laplace. Buffon, influenced by the writing of Leibnitz, in his Theorie de la Terre, published in 1749, adopted his notion of an original volcanic nucleus and a universal ocean, the latter ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... climbing incense thick and sweet, The lovely purpose that aspires, The wraiths of vapor wing'd and fleet That rise and run with eager feet Forth from a myriad altar fires: All these become a mist that fills The vales and chasms nebular; A shaping Soul that moves and thrills The wastes between ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis

... quite so certain that a genetic 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 of nebulous fog, which may have been constituted by ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... the work of the first, second, and third days in Genesis would be confirmed by the demonstration of the truth of the nebular hypothesis; whether it is corroborated by what is known of the nature and probable relative antiquity of the heavenly bodies; whether, if the Hebrew word translated "firmament" in the Authorised Version really means "expanse," the assertion that the waters ...
— The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature - Essay #4 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley

... cold, the dark are contrasted with the rare, the warm, the dry, and bright; and the formation of stones is spoken of as a specific condensation due to the influence of cold. Here, then, we have nearly all the elements of the Daltonian theory of atoms on the one hand, and the nebular hypothesis of Laplace on the other. But this is not quite all. In addition to such diverse elementary particles as those of gold, water, and the rest, Anaxagoras conceived a species of particles differing from all the others, not merely as they differ from one another, but constituting a class ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... formative fluid. The evidence points rather towards the axiom, Omnis cellula a cellula; that is, the germ of a new cell is always derived from a preexisting cell. The doctrine of Schwann, as I remarked long ago (1844), runs parallel with the nebular theory in astronomy, and they may yet ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... a breakfast! Do you suppose that I would ruin the reputation of my voice in one fell moment? Now what kind of clay led to this remark? Do as your doctor says. Recline on the lounge. Close your eyes. Here is a treatise on the Nebular Hypothesis that looks unintelligible enough for ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... specialized trainings. Four hundred and ninety of them cannot competently examine either a religious plan or a political one. A scattering few of them do examine both—that is, they think they do. With results as precious as when I examine the nebular theory and explain ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... of showing that if the Nebular Hypothesis be true, the genesis of the solar system supplies one illustration of this law, let us assume that the matter of which the sun and planets consist was once in a diffused form; and that from the gravitation of its atoms there resulted a gradual ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... astronomy mathematically worked out according to the theory of gravitation. They proved the solar system to be stable; all its inequalities being periodic, not cumulative. And Laplace suggested the "nebular hypothesis" concerning the origin of sun and planets: a hypothesis previously suggested, and to some extent, ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... had not had time to arrange themselves in new combinations. The active intellects of the country had found enough to keep them busy in creating and organizing a new order of political and social life. Whatever purely literary talent existed was as yet in the nebular condition, a diffused luminous spot here and there, waiting ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... of 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 sculptured out the main features of our ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball

... Regarding the date of creation Regarding the Creator Regarding light and darkness Rise of the conception of an evolution: among the Chaldeans, the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans Its survival through the Middle Ages, despite the disfavour of the Church Its development in modern times.—The nebular hypothesis and its struggle with theology The idea of evolution at last victorious Our sacred books themselves an illustration of its truth The true ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... The Nebular Hypothesis, of which I have just given an imperfect sketch, has for its object to show how a nebula endowed with a general movement of rotation must eventually transform itself into a very luminous central nucleus (a sun), and into a series of distinct spheroidal planets, situate at considerable ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... defensive purposes and Phil had remarked as much on the day that he and Cristy Lawson had climbed to it. They had stood looking around at the huge broken slabs of granite and speculating upon the oddness of the formation, while their conversation had taken on an academic flavor as they discussed the nebular and glacial theories. They had discovered at the bottom of a great cleft in the rock, a spring of sparkling water, so cold that it was impossible to drink it without frequent pauses. They had named the place "The Saucer," had eaten ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse

... Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... dense fog (totally invisible, remember, alike to the naked eye and to the 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 ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss

... Kant, "and I will build the world;" and he proceeds to deduce from the simple data from which he starts, a doctrine in all essential respects similar to the well-known "Nebular Hypothesis" of Laplace.[13] He accounts for the relation of the masses and the densities of the planets to their distances from the sun, for the eccentricities of their orbits, for their rotations, for their satellites, ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... enlightenment of the nineteenth century. Leibnitz, in the latter part of the seventeenth century first uttered the opinion that the earth was once in a fluid condition and Kant about the middle of the eighteenth century, definitely propounded the nebular hypothesis, which was enlarged as a theory by the Herschels. The first writer to suggest the transmutation of species among animals was Buffon, about 1750, and other writers followed out the idea. The eccentric Lord Monboddo was the first to suggest the possible descent of man from the ape, ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens

... about to start from London to Brighton, and the guard walking up and down announcing to the passengers the alarming fact that "this train stops nowhere." An old gentleman was seen vainly gesticulating out of the window and imploring to be let out ere the frightful journey was commenced. In the nebular railway the passengers would almost require ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various

... mechanics paved the way for a definite scientific theory, the so-called "nebular hypothesis," announced by La Place in 1796, and by the philosopher Kant at a still earlier date. Largely through the Newtonian principle of the parallelogram of forces, the present masses, orbits, and velocities were analyzed into a more primitive process of concentration within a ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... would not exist. Our calendar would still be in all essential respects as 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 ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... culture, which people often accuse of stifling imagination, on the contrary opens to it a field much vaster than esthetics. Astronomy delights in infinitudes of time and space: it sees worlds arise, burn at first with the feeble light of a nebular mass, glow like suns, become chilled, covered with spots, and then become condensed. Geology follows the development of our earth through upheavals and cataclysms: it foresees a distant future when our globe, deprived of the atmospheric vapors that protect it, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... nebular navigation beats all my experience," said Captain Arms, wiping the water out of his eyes. "I was struck by a waterspout once in the Indian Ocean, and I thought that that capped the climax, but it was only a catspaw ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss

... Saturn, known as Phoebe, is revolving in a direction the exact contrary of that which all known astronomical laws would have led us to expect. English astronomers admit that this may necessitate a fundamental revision of the nebular hypothesis.—Weekly Paper. ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.



Words linked to "Nebular" :   nebulous, cloudlike, nebular hypothesis, uranology, astronomy



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com