1900's Science and Technology | The Evolution of Worlds

Nonfiction work

By: Percival Lowell

Date: 1909

Source: Lowell, Percival. The Evolution of Worlds. New York: Macmillan, 1909, 1–3.

About the Author: Percival Lowell (1855–1916) was born in Boston. He published four novels on Asian culture before turning to astronomy. He built an observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, through which he scanned Mars, popularizing the notion that intelligent life once inhabited it. Lowell predicted the existence of Pluto twenty-five years before its discovery.

Introduction

The question of the origin and end of the universe fascinated the ancients, all of whom had creation myths, such as the Hebrew story of creation in Genesis, to account for its origin. For Christian scholars Christ's Parousia, or Second Coming, described the universe's end. Yet the twelfth-century Muslim philosopher Averroes warned that no evidence supported...