Abstract
The French Impressionist artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir liked to paint outside, en plein air. The experience brought a freshness, an immediacy, to his canvasses. No matter how often he painted in the gardens of Giverny or in the forests of Fontainebleau, nature always provided surprises. In his diaries he commented, “You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat.” He could have been talking about planetary science.
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Notes
- 1.
The Picture History of Astronomy by Patrick Moore (Grosset & Dunlap, 1961).
- 2.
At the time, scientists believed that the primordial Earth harbored a reducing atmosphere similar to that of the gas giants today. Although this assumption is no longer held, the experimental work is still applicable to outer planet analogies. Miller’s later work used different combinations of gases more likely to have occurred on the primordial Earth.
- 3.
They conducted the experiment subsequently at the University of California at San Diego, where it was published in 1954.
- 4.
Planets by Carl Sagan, Jonathan Norton Leonard and the Editors of LIFE (LIFE Science Library, 1966).
- 5.
Triton’s atmosphere also generates hydrocarbons, but with far less atmosphere, and fewer chemical reactions take place in its environment.
- 6.
Dr. Murray is at Queen Mary, University of London.
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Carroll, M. (2015). The Gas and Ice Giants. In: Living Among Giants. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10674-8_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10674-8_4
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