Philosophy, VI – Natural Philosophy. Cosmogony, Physics, Chemistry
Engels examines Duhring's application of his method to the question of the origins of the Earth and other planets. By this time, the idea that the solar system arose out of a hot gaseous disc, as proposed by Kant, had become established.
“The Kantian theory of the origin of all existing celestial bodies from rotating nebular masses was the greatest advance made by astronomy since Copernicus. For the first time the idea that nature had no history in time began to be shaken. Until then the celestial bodies were believed to have remained in the same permanent orbits and states from the beginning; and even though individual organisms on particular celestial bodies died out, genera and species were nevertheless held to be immutable. It is true that nature was conceived as obviously in constant motion, but this motion appeared as an incessant repetition of the same processes.” (p 70)
These previous conceptions are fully consistent with metaphysics. It imposes an inherently conservative framework, in which whatever exists, and is observed at the time, is taken to be the normal state, a state that has always been and always will be. Any divergence from this normal state, and path is, then, unnatural, and so attempts to prevent any such divergence from the natural balance, or to reverse any such divergence, become reactionary. That may be apparent, for example, in feudal regimes where the order of society is seen as being God given, absolute and eternal, but it applies equally to bourgeois society, which, once established, also, continually reproduces its own ideology, in which things such as markets, commodities, money, capital and wage-labour are presented as universal and eternal. It is seen in other spheres too, for example, the concept of a “balance of nature” is supposed to exist, which must be maintained.
Copernicus had established the model of the solar system we have today, in which the planets orbit the Sun, rather than as presented in the Bible, the Earth being at the centre of the universe. Yet, as Engels says, this was, at the time it was proposed, only a hypothesis. It required confirmation. That came in Le Verrier's calculation, based on it, of the necessity of the existence of Neptune, which was, subsequently, discovered, in 1846, by Galle.
Similarly, to Duhring's dismay, spectroscopic maps of the universe, also, proved the existence of the hot gas clouds from which star systems arise, consistent with Kant's theory. But, without the same kind of proof of how such systems arise, it also remained only a hypothesis, which enabled Duhring to pour scorn on it. At the time Engels was writing, no proof was possible, of Kant's hypothesis, but, now, we do have not only the theoretical models of the mechanism by which star systems are formed from nebulae, but we have the powerful telescopes available to actually see this process of star formation in action, in so called stellar nurseries.
“It was really fortunate for Kant that he could be content with going back from the existing celestial bodies to the nebular ball, and that he did not even dream of the self-identical state of matter! It may be remarked in passing that when contemporary natural science describes the Kantian nebular ball as primordial nebula, it is self-evident that this is only to be understood in a relative sense. It is a primordial nebula, on the one hand, because it is the origin of the existing celestial bodies, and on the other because it is the earliest form of matter which up to now we have been able to work back to. This certainly does not exclude but rather implies the supposition that matter passed through an infinite series of other forms before the nebular stage.” (p 72)
Again, although this could only be hypothesised, at that time, the Big Bang theory set out the mechanism by which that transpired, whilst the mapping of the existing, observable universe conforms to the computer simulations of that process, and the mapping of cosmic background microwave radiation is consistent with the residual effect from it.
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