Mary Fairfax Greig Somerville (Jedburgh, Escòcia, 1780 – Nàpols, Itàlia, 1872)

“So numerous are the objects which meet our view in the heavens, that we cannot imagine a point of space where some light would not strike the eye;—innumerable stars, thousands of double and multiple systems, clusters in one blaze with their tens of thousands of stars, and the nebulae amazing us by the strangeness of their forms and the incomprehensibility of their nature, till at last, from the limit of our senses, even these thin and airy phantoms vanish in the distance. If such remote bodies shone by reflected light, we should be unconscious of their existence. Each star must then be a sun, and may be presumed to have its system of planets, satellites, and comets, like our own; and, for aught we know, myriads of bodies may be wandering in space unseen by us, of whose nature we can for no idea, and still less of the part they perform in the economy of the universe”.

Fragment de: Mary Fairfax Greig Somerville, On the connexion of the Physical Sciences (1846), p. 381.

[https://archive.org/details/onconnectionphy03somegoog/page/n398]

Per conèixer més:

Martha Somervile, Personal recollections, from early life to old age, of Mary Somerville, Boston: Robert Brothers, 1874.

Elizabeth C. Patterson, “Mary Somerville”, The British Journal for the History of Science, 4 (1969), 311-339.

Claire Brock, “The Public Worth of Mary Somerville”, British Society for the History of Science, 39 (2006), 255-272.

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