Robert E. Paul

ROBERT PAUL is an associate professor of the history of science and of computer science at Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa. A specialist on the history of science since the Renaissance, he is completing a book on the development of astrophysics and modern cosmology to 1930. A version of this paper was delivered at the Mormon History Association annual meeting in Omaha, May 1983. My sincere thanks to Lester Bush for editorial and organizational improvements and to Doug Alder and Robert E. Dixon for their continuing interest in this study. I am particularly grateful to Professor Michael Crowe of the University of Notre Dame for having allowed me access to his important manuscript on the development of the plurality of worlds idea before publicatio

Joseph Smith and the Plurality of Worlds Idea

Articles/Essays – Volume 19, No. 2

Joseph Smith was not the first person to use the plurality of worlds concept. In the early seventeenth century, natural philosophers began speculating on the idea of multiple world systems. By the eighteenth century, Protestant…