The mule on the Mount Wilson trail: George Ellery Hale, American scientific cosmology, and cosmologies of American science

TL;DR

This paper examines how scientific cosmology and social cosmology intersect through the history of the Mount Wilson Observatory and its founder George Ellery Hale.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel analysis of how scientific and social cosmologies interact through the lens of the Mount Wilson Observatory’s history.

Findings

The Mount Wilson Observatory's scientific work influenced broader cosmological understandings.

Hale and his team integrated scientific cosmology with local social and political practices.

The observatory's work reflected struggles to reconcile cosmic and terrestrial orders.

Abstract

This article explores the relation between two different modes of cosmology: the social and the scientific. Over the twentieth century, scientific understandings of the dimensions and operations of the physical universe changed dramatically, significantly prompted by astronomical and astrophysical research undertaken at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. Could those understandings be readily translated into social theory? Studies across a range of disciplines have intimated that the scientific cosmos might be less essential to the worlds of meaning and belonging that people and communities compose around themselves than more local and relational models of an ordered whole. The article applies that proposition to the Mount Wilson Observatory itself, arguing that the observatory’s founder, George Ellery Hale, and his acolytes were deeply invested in practices of terrestrial place-making, the politics of belonging, and the cadences of civilizational time as applied to their city and its region. Moreover, they struggled to construct a philosophy integrating the cosmos they were seeking to fix at home with the contortions and careering trajectories of the universal whole.

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