Popularizing the Cosmos: Pedagogies of Science and Society in Anton Pannekoek’s Life and Work

In his 1961 historical account of the origin and development of astronomy, Pannekoek touched only lightly on the two subjects that had brought him greatest scientific fame: his investigations of the Milky Way and stellar spectra. Instead, he mapped the unfolding of what he referred to as ‘the concept of the universe’, which he defined as a ‘new concept of the world’ that had opened ‘new ways of thinking’. Driven by ‘a strong social development’, he stated, astronomy since the sixteenth century had unsettled beliefs and certainties, disclosing ‘ that what seemed the most certain knowledge of the foundation of