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(Mis)Translating Entropy?: Camille Flammarion and the Multiple Theologies of the Death of the Universe

Abstract

By the 1860s, the tendency of matter toward increasing chaos—or entropy—had become a fundamental tenet of the new science of thermodynamics. But in Victorian Britain, the ramifications of this second law of thermodynamics for a Christian conception of a progressive universe remained subject to heated ideological debate. Historians of thermodynamics have held up French astronomer Camille Flammarion’s popular science fiction as comprehensive evidence that this entropic–theological debate was widespread across disciplines, media, and cultures. I show that Flammarion’s argument has been misrepresented. Not only did Flammarion not employ entropic heat-death metaphors at all—instead evoking a hot apocalypse—but he interpreted entropy through a distinctive theology, at odds with that of British scientists. A study of Flammarion’s theology, concept of entropy, and novels exhibits how investigating influential popular works can dismantle assumptions about the geographic and religious scope of the entropic–theological debate.

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Fig. 1

Taken from Flammarion La Fin du Monde (Flammarion, 1894), 134

Fig. 2

Taken from Flammarion La Fin du Monde (Flammarion, 1894), 134

References

  1. Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 238; Helge Kragh, Entropic Creation: Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2008), 38.

  2. Bruce Clark; Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Michigan: University of Michigan Press; 2001), Barri Gold, Thermopoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (Boston: MIT Press, 2010)

  3. Camille Flammarion, La Fin Du Monde (Paris: Flammarion, 1984).

  4. Kragh, Entropic Creation (ref. 1), ch. 3; Smith, The Science of Energy (ref. 1), ch. 5.

  5. Smith, The Science of Energy (ref. 1), 110.

  6. “Maxwell explains the untenability of strict materialist dogma to Mark Pattison,” 1868, quoted in Smith, The Science of Energy (ref. 1), 238.

  7. Kragh, Entropic Creation (ref. 1), 38.

  8. Smith, The Science of Energy (ref. 1) 240–41.

  9. Smith, The Science of Energy (ref. 1), 184.

  10. Smith, The Science of Energy (ref. 1), 253.

  11. Bernard Lightman, “Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press: Tyndall’s Belfast Address,” in Science Serialised: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth Century Periodicals, eds. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, 199–237 (London: MIT Press, 2004), 200–201.

  12. Conversely, in the German context, thermodynamics was often framed in the language of a budding science of physiology in the pens of Heinrich Helmholtz and Ernst Mayer—see Kragh, Entropic Creation (ref. 1), 36.

  13. Smith, The Science of Energy, (ref. 1), 250.

  14. Barri Gold, “The Reign of Force” in Gold, Thermopoetics (ref. 2).

  15. Gold, Thermopoetics (ref. 2); Terry Harpold, “European Science Fiction in the Nineteenth Century” in The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, eds. Gerry Canavan and Eric C. Link (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 50–68.

  16. Daniel Fondaneche, La Littérature D’imagination Scientifique (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2012).

  17. Robert Fox, The Savant and the State: Science and Cultural Politics in Nineteenth Century France (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2012), 195–207.

  18. Fox, The Savant and the State (ref. 17), 142.

  19. Victor Moigno, La Foi et la Science (1875), quoted in Fox, The Savant and the State (ref. 17), 193–94.

  20. John Farley and Gerald Geison “Science, Politics and Spontaneous Generation in Nineteenth-Century France: The Pasteur-Pouchet Debate,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 48, no. 2 (1974), 161–98.

  21. Gold, Thermopoetics (ref. 2), 225.

  22. Hector MacPherson, “Camille Flammarion,” Popular Astronomy 33 (1925), 654.

  23. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, “Camille Flammarion: Prestige de la Science Populaire” Romantisme 65, (1989), 94.

  24. Bensaude-Vincent, “Camille Flammarion” (ref. 23), 94.

  25. Bruno Béguet, La Science Pour Tous: sur la Vulgarisation Scientifique en France de 1850 à 1914 (Paris: Biblioteque du Conservatoire National des Arts et des Metiers, 1990).

  26. Tracing the literary heritage of thermodynamic work in the British and French contexts is beyond the scope of this paper, but for more on the exchange between thermodynamics and literature in the nineteenth century see Gold, Thermopoetics (ref. 2). For the interaction between Flammarion’s work and that of the French Symbolist artists and writers, see Serena Keshavjee, “Science and the Visual Culture of Spiritualism: Camille Flammarion and the Symbolists in fin-de-siècle France,” Aries 13, no. 1 (2013), 37–69.

  27. Flammarion, Death and its Mystery, vol. 1, Before Death; vol. 2, At the Moment of Death; vol. 3, After Death (Paris: Flammarion, 1922–23). Flammarion had a loyal following, including a French countess who died prematurely of tuberculosis. Although they never met, the woman asked her doctor that when she died he would cut a large piece of skin from her back, bring it to Flammarion, and ask that he have it tanned and used to bind a copy of his next book. Flammarion's first copy of Terres du Ciel was bound in this way, with an inscription in gold on the front cover: “Pious fulfillment of an anonymous wish/ Binding in human skin (woman) 1882.”

  28. Robert Fox, The Savant and the State (ref. 17), 196.

  29. Camille Flammarion, Oration Delivered at the Grave of Allan Kardec (Paris: Didier, 1869), quoted in Keshavjee, “Science and the Visual Culture of Spiritualism” (ref. 26), 38.

  30. Bensaude-Vincent, “Camille Flammarion” (ref. 23), 100.

  31. Camille Flammarion, Études et Lectures Sur l’Astronomie (Paris: Flammarion, 1867–80), 16. [citing volume 10 of this work].

  32. John L. Heilbron, “Fin-de-Siècle Physics,” in Science, Technology and Society in the Time of Alfred Nobel, eds. Carl Gustaf Bernhard, Elisabeth Crawford, and Per Sörbom (Oxford: Nobel Foundation, 1982), 51–3.

  33. Bensaude-Vincent, "Camille Flammarion" (ref. 23), 96.

  34. Quoted in Aubin et al., The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth Century Science and Culture (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010), 320.

  35. This may have been how the works of Jules Verne were seen. See Jean Chesneaux, The Political and Social Ideas of Jules Verne (London: Reform Club, 1972).

  36. Flammarion, La Fin Du Monde (ref. 3), 49. All translations are the author’s unless otherwise stated.

  37. Flammarion, La Fin Du Monde (ref. 3), chs. 1–7.

  38. Flammarion, La Fin Du Monde (ref. 3), 400.

  39. Flammarion, La Fin Du Monde (ref. 3), 365–85.

  40. Flammarion, La Fin Du Monde (ref. 3), 384.

  41. Flammarion, La Fin Du Monde (ref. 3), 385. Emphasis added.

  42. Flammarion, La Fin Du Monde (ref. 3), 373.

  43. Flammarion, La Fin Du Monde (ref. 3), 410.

  44. Flammarion, La Fin Du Monde (ref. 3), 410.

  45. Flammarion, La Fin Du Monde (ref. 3), 388.

  46. While it is beyond the scope of this paper, the artistic style of these images suggest Flammarion’s Symbolist influences, and indeed Keshavjee has shown that Flammarion was ensconced in Symbolist circles: Keshavjee, "Science and the Visual Culture of Spiritualism" (ref. 26). This is an area for further research which could mirror Gold’s method in Gold, Thermopoetics (ref. 2) for analyzing the mutual exchange between physicists and artists in Victorian Britain.

  47. Flammarion, La Fin Du Monde, (ref. 3), 414. “Matière et forces se transforment, mais la même quantité de masse et de puissance subsiste. Les êtres vivants nous donnent cet exemple perpétuel : ils naissent, grandissent en s’agrégeant des substances puisées dans le monde extérieur et, lorsqu’ils meurent, se désagrègent et rendent à la nature tous les éléments dont leur corps avait été formé.”

  48. To use Smith’s terminology which was previously used, see Smith, The Science of Energy (ref. 1), 238; Balfour Stewart and Peter G. Tait, The Unseen Universe: Physical Speculations on a Future State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1875), 28–29.

  49. Stewart and Tait, The Unseen Universe (ref. 51), 140–53.

  50. Stewart and Tait, The Unseen Universe (ref. 51), chs. 2, 6, 7.

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Correspondence to Nadya D. Kelly.

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Nadya D. Kelly is a science and climate policymaker in the UK Government. Her historical research focusses on the turn of the century history of entropy.

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Kelly, N.D. (Mis)Translating Entropy?: Camille Flammarion and the Multiple Theologies of the Death of the Universe. Phys. Perspect. 24, 208–222 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-022-00293-9

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Keywords

  • Entropy
  • thermodynamics
  • fin de siècle
  • Camille Flammarion
  • theology
  • spiritualism
  • degeneration
  • France
  • physics
  • astronomy
  • anti-materialism