3 ms·

I agree wholeheartedly with all of your sentiments, but I don't think that Kant discovered galaxies or had much interest in them. That honor goes to Messier or

• not2b 2y ago
  Messier catalogued many objects, some of which were galaxies, but he did not know what they were. It was Hubble who first figured out (in the 1920s) that there were definitely separate galaxies. https://lco.global/spacebook/galaxies/history-discovery/ https://lco.global/spacebook/galaxies/history-discovery/
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• bbor 2y ago
  That’s why I love this fun fact so much :) He spent a good deal of his life on natural science before turning to philosophy, not unlike Newton and Liebniz — he just happened to be way better at philosophy than science. It doesn’t help that Newton’s plan was alchemy-based, ofc. Anyway, from Kant’s Wikipedia: In the Universal Natural History, Kant laid out the nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Kant also correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the solar system to galactic and intergalactic realms. From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life