A Paradox and Its Aftermath

Abstract

The scientific community was not the only one to rejoice in the expanding horizons. Philosophers and authors, naturalists and poets—their imagination fired by the new vistas that the telescope has opened before them—now set to work to describe the new cosmology. Indeed, their imagination carried them to realms which even the most powerful telescope could not reach. Echoing Bruno, the English philosopher and poet Henry More (1614–1687) wrote his version of the plurality of worlds:

The Centre of each sever all world’s a Sunne…

About whose radiant crown the Planets runne,

Like reeling moths around a candle light;

These all together, one world, I conceit,

And that even infinite such worlds there be,

That inexhausted Good that God is hight,

A full sufficient reason is to me.

… I have heard urged that if the number of Fixt Stars were more than finite, the whole superficies of their apparent Sphere would be luminous…

—Edmond Halley (1656–1742)