Gazing at a Dying Sun: Lord Kelvin, Victorian Narratives, and the Collapse of the Conception of Historical Progress
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Spurred by the widely popular arguments of the scientist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, the idea that the sun was cooling and gradually dying recurred as an image of gloom in the Victorian imaginary. Such an image spanned cultural, literary, and scientific discourse. I specifically focus on the unsettling impact such imagery had on the prevailing, triumphalist Victorian narrative of history, with its emphasis on constant, linear progress. From literary writers such as Charles Dickens to scientific writers such as Frances Power Cobbe, Balfour Stewart, and even Charles Darwin, I investigate how a variety of intellectuals trembled at the thought of the sun's death, even in the distant future. Such a thought connoted the tenuousness of humanity's status, the terror that humanity's gradual ascent toward prosperity and perfection was ultimately doomed. The idea of the dying, blackening sun was a formidable scientific possibility, but it also served as a fitting symbol for the growing uncertainty and malaise lingering beneath the technological advancement and material enrichment that ostensibly constituted Victorian progress. In the last portion of the essay, I highlight the efforts of two writers to articulate a different, modified image of progress, one liberated from the rigid framework of history as a linear, inevitable account of constant advancement. One of these writers is the scientist T. H. Huxley, while the other is the novelist and Huxley-disciple H. G. Wells. They represent an attempt to articulate a positive, realistic vision of societal improvement while actively contending with the possibility of a dying sun.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".