The Geography of the Puranas c13.s5.4

c13.s5.4

The earliest cosmogony or theory of the Universe in which the laws of gravitation found a place was that of Kant, the Prussian philosopher (1755). He assumed that the collision of the hard particles of the primordial matter (conceived as supernaturally created) generated heat and rotation as they fell in upon one another under their mutual gravitational attraction. Thus, the original cold motionless cloud of matter became in due course a vast hot nebula, spinning so rapidly that rings of matter were successively thrown off its equator by centrifugal action, while the residual central mass remained as the Sun. Each ring was supposed to have condensed as a planet, which by a small-scale repetition of the same process threw off satellites; ultimately in this way the complete solar system came into being. Kant's hypothesis is dynamically unsound but our interest in the theory lies in the fact that on the one hand it follows the pattern of Purāṇic cosmogony, i.e., the creation of the Egg or nucleus or Brahmā (or according to Kant, the existence of the original cold and motionless cloud and its transformation into a hot rotating nebula), during the process of universal creation, while on the other it is the forerunner of the very similar and justly famous nebular hypothesis of Laplace (1796) on which modern speculations on cosmogony are based.