Morphological Astronomy

Man has a great tendency to get lost or to hide, as the case may be, in a jungle of details and in unnecessary complications. Why do anything simply if you can do it complicated? And still, life itself presents a sufficient number of problems to keep us busy. There would seem to be no need to create additional difficulties, just for the fun of it, especially if these self-made difficulties become practically insuperable and if in the end they cause much unhappiness. The morphological mode of thought and of action was conceived to break the vicious hold which the parasitic wild growth of complications exerts on life in all of its phases. Morphological thought and action are likely to be of value in all human activities, once such thought and action have been clearly delineated and fully developed, and once they have been practised by a sufficiently large number of people. Since the morphological method is of the greatest universality, the choice of the field to which one applies it first is not particulary critical. The author intends to write two or three books on the morphology of several large scale problems, which are both of a technical and of a general social nature. The present book is concerned in particular with some implications of morphological thinking in astronomy. We shall above all emphasize the basic character of the morphological approach, and we shall demonstrate its constructive power in a number of specific cases. Front Matter....Pages I-IV Morphological Research and Invention....Pages 6-30 Clouds and Clusters of Galaxies....Pages 30-88 The Large Scale Distribution of Galaxies and of Clusters of Galaxies....Pages 88-114 Kinematic and Dynamic Characteristics of the Large Scale Aggregations of Matter....Pages 114-148 Dimensional and Dimensionless Morphology in Cosmology....Pages 149-192 Morphological Features of Individual Galaxies....Pages 192-231 Morphological Astronomical Kaleidoscope....Pages 231-270 The Morphological Method and a Priori Knowledge. The Magic Numbers....Pages 270-282 Epilogue....Pages 282-290 Back Matter....Pages 290-299