John Adams and the Doctrinal Challenge of Extraterrestria...

Sometime in the summer of 1786 the fifty-year-old John Adams, graduate of Harvard University, man of science and future second President of the United States, turned up one morning uninvited at The Grove. He was shown round all Herschel’s new telescopes, and they embarked on an impassioned discussion of the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the moral implications of there being a ‘plurality of worlds’. This was the sort of metaphysical debate that Herschel had once had with his ...

 The Founding Fathers were Scientists

Declaration of Independence puts it - 'the laws of nature and of nature's GOD'. Dr Benjamin Franklin was revered in Europe and America as the founder of the new field of electrical physics. At the Constitutional Convention of 1789 John Adams repeatedly appealed to the analogy of mechanical balance in machines; others to William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. Late in life Adams wrote, 'All mankind are chemists from their cradles to their graves . . . The Material Universe ...