Constructing the Origins of the Solar System: Scientific Knowledge and Public Perceptions

Abstract

Where did the solar system come from? Why and how? What accounts for its evolution over time? Those questions have plagued scientists, philosophers, theologians, and other thinkers from the point where humanity first realized that Earth was part of a large system of bodies all interacting with each other. The first attempts to explain in naturalistic terms the origins of the solar system some 400 years ago may seem rudimentary by today‟s standards, but current explanations remain incomplete and some of their elements may well prove naive as future scientists continue to investigate this subject. During the space age intensive efforts resulted in a revolution in knowledge gained about the solar system. Using data newly available, scientists structured theories, always more than one, of solar system origin and evolution that reflected that larger sets of beliefs of the various communities and disciplines working on the question. Most theories involved to some degree a common set of elements: the collapse of cloud of gas and cosmic dust into the sun and the concentration of globs into planets and other smaller bodies, were seen as part of a single process. The devil was in the details concerning this process, however, and scientists endlessly debated the roles of condensation versus of accretion, hot versus cold origins, the role of geological processes, the nature of wandering bodies, and the like. Consensus positions proved elusive. Even so, the story filtered through textbooks, popular writings, and multi-media presentations offered more certainty and less acknowledgment of tentativeness to the public than the scientists thought appropriate. This essay explores the manner in which knowledge about the solar system was created and evolved in the space science community and then was homogenized, popularized, and offered to the larger public and the manner in which that larger community of the United States incorporated it into its knowledge system. At the same time, how has the wider society embraced, or perhaps rejected, these larger scientific ideas about the origins of the solar system. Using the challenge to scientific principles present in the current creationist/intelligent design as the basis of analysis, this essay will relate one radical overturning of scientific knowledge in favor of beliefs about the origins of the solar system predicated on other assumptions. This development suggests the manner in which recent post-modern ideas have affected the nature of scientific theories and public perceptions of them.