Neptune: From Grand Discovery To A World Revealed: Essays On The 200th Anniversary of The Birth of John Couch Adams 1st Edition William Sheehan

Neptune: From Grand Discovery to a
World Revealed: Essays on the 200th

Anniversary of the Birth of John Couch
Adams 1st Edition William Sheehan
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Historical & Cultural Astronomy
Series Editors: W. Orchiston · M. Rothenberg · C. Cunningham
William Sheehan Editor-in-Chief

Trudy E. Bell
Carolyn Kennett
Robert W. Smith Editors
Neptune: From
Grand Discovery to
a World Revealed
Essays on the 200th Anniversary
of the Birth of John Couch Adams
Series Editors: WAYNE ORCHISTON, University of Southern Queensland,

Australia (wayne.orchiston@usq.edu.au)
MARC ROTHENBERG, Smithsonian Institution (retired),
USA (josephhenr@aol.com)
CLIFFORD CUNNINGHAM, University of Southern
Queensland, Australia (Cliff.Cunningham@usq.edu.au)
Editorial Board: JAMES EVANS, University of Puget Sound, USA

MILLER GOSS, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, USA
DUANE HAMACHER, Monash University, Australia
JAMES LEQUEUX, Observatoire de Paris, France
SIMON MITTON, St. Edmund’s College Cambridge
University, UK
CLIVE RUGGLES, University of Leicester, UK
VIRGINIA TRIMBLE, University of California Irvine, USA
GUDRUN WOLFSCHMIDT, Institute for History of Science
and Technology, Germany
TRUDY E. BELL, Sky & Telescope, USA
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15156

Editor-in-Chief
William Sheehan
Trudy E. Bell • Carolyn Kennett • Robert W. Smith

Editors
Neptune: From Grand

Discovery to a World
Revealed
Essays on the 200th Anniversary of the Birth
of John Couch Adams
Editor-in-Chief
William Sheehan
Independent Scholar
Flagstaff, AZ, USA
Editors
Trudy E. Bell Carolyn Kennett
Sky & Telescope Independent Scholar
Lakewood, OH, USA Helston, Cornwall, UK
Robert W. Smith
Department of History and Classics
University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB, Canada
ISSN 2509-310X ISSN 2509-3118 (electronic)

ISBN 978-3-030-54217-7 ISBN 978-3-030-54218-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54218-4
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2021
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Frontispiece. This image, obtained on June 18, 2018, during commissioning of the narrow field
mode of the MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) spectrograph on the European Southern
Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) array, located high in the Atacama Desert of Chile, is
one of the best ever taken from the earth (Credit: MUSE Consortium and ESO)
v
“Let us all praise famous men.”
In memory of our colleagues, friends, and

three great students of Neptune, whose
influence and contributions we here
gratefully acknowledge:
Richard Baum (1930–2016)

Bradford A. Smith (1931–2018)
Craig B. Waff (1946–2012)
Foreword
The first sighting of the planet Neptune, by Johann Gottfried Galle and Heinrich
Louis d’Arrest at the Berlin Observatory on September 23, 1846, was the culmina-
tion of one of the great international quests in scientific history. An Englishman and
a Frenchman had independently calculated the position of the Uranus-disturbing
planet, while a German clinched the achievement by giving Neptune—as it would
later be christened—its “first light" of visual recognition. Then, American mathe-
maticians were central in computing its orbit from historical sightings. The discov-
ery seemed to provide a resounding proof for the forensic power of Newtonian
gravitation, in so far as Newton’s theory was needed to predict the position of a
hitherto unknown body, by means of the gravitational behavior of a known one.
But as Dr. William Sheehan so clearly points out, the whole Neptune discovery
saga right back to the I840s has been the focus for all manner of controversy.
Controversies included Anglo-French exchanges, apparently a hero and villain
polarization of the various personalities involved, along with a trail of conspiracy
theories. And needless to say, twentieth-century popular science writers have had a
field day with it, for—in the “right hands”—Adams’s and Le Verrier’s calculations
and their consequences can be crafted into a fine thumping tale, replete with missed
clues and opportunities, mutual jealousies, and dark dealings!
I personally have had a fascination with the whole affair since my youthful read-
ing of Morton Grosser’s The Discovery of Neptune (1962), which for years was the
definitive book on the subject. But then, more recent scholars recognized that the
only credible way forward was to return ad fontes, to the primary sources. In par-
ticular, these included the vast archive of Sir George Biddell Airy, the Astronomer
Royal, now classified under “RGO 6,” including his daily “Journal.” Once stored at
the Royal Observatory archive at Herstmonceux Castle, Kent, they now reside in the
Cambridge University Library, along with parallel documents now preserved in
Cambridge, Paris, Berlin, and elsewhere.
And from this scholarly approach, a much more balanced interpretation began to
emerge, especially after the missing “RGO 6 Neptune file” was brought back from
Chile to where somehow it had wandered, to provide a resounding refutation of the
myth that the guilty Airy had destroyed it.
ix
x Foreword
William Sheehan; his fellow editors Trudy E. Bell, Carolyn Kennett, and Robert
W. Smith; and their six additional contributors have resolved to follow a true path
through the surviving scholarly literature pertaining to the Neptune discovery, to
give a modern, balanced evaluation of the whole affair.
Each contributor approaches from a particular perspective and places the discov-
ery of Neptune within a precise historical context. The English, French, German,
and American contributions are carefully discussed, along with the scientific and
other motives displayed by the individual astronomers.
Yet, what long puzzled me is why John Couch Adams did not announce his 1845
Neptune calculations to the world in The Times newspaper, as he had done on
October 15, 1844, with his calculations pertaining to de Vico’s comet. For this
would have secured the unequivocal priority and prestige for the young fellow of St.
John’s College, Cambridge. Yet for some reason, he never did so.
Nor was it clear why Adams never took his computed planet position to the
superbly equipped, self-funded, and independent community of British “Grand
Amateur” astronomers, several of whom owned telescopes of much greater power
and size than those in the Cambridge University and Greenwich observatories and
who had no public or academic duties to occupy their time. Such gentlemen consti-
tuted most of the Fellowship of the RAS and of the Royal Society, and Adams must
either have met many of them personally or read their journal publications.
The first Englishman to sight Neptune, on September 30, 1846, working from
data which had reached England from the Continent, was John Russell Hind,
employed director of the privately owned South Villa, Regent’s Park, Observatory.
Then, reading about the Berlin discovery, William Lassell, FRAS and FRS (1849),
the Liverpool Grand Amateur, awaited the next clear night, so that he could direct
his mighty 24-inch-aperture, 24-foot-focal-length equatorial reflector to the correct
place in the sky. Lassell’s notebooks in the RAS Library suggest that on the night of
October 2–3, 1846, he saw the planet immediately, its disk shape making it instantly
recognizable. Then, upon what was probably the next good night, October 10, 1846,
Lassell not only immediately found Neptune shining brightly but also saw its large
satellite, subsequently christened Triton, along with what he (incorrectly) believed
to be a ring encircling the new planet.
Likewise, Lord Rosse, an astronomical friend of Lassell’s, with his newly opera-
tional 72-inch-aperture “Leviathan,” would have seen Neptune at first glance had he
been asked to look for it. So why did Adams never tap into this extensive, and
wholly accessible, astronomical resource of serious and superbly equipped British
“Grand Amateur” astronomers? This book reexamines these and other questions.
Bill Sheehan and his colleagues have forged a clear path through almost two centu-
ries of Neptunian history. That history extends from first puzzlement regarding Uranus’s
orbital behavior through the brilliant analyses of mathematicians, the controversy sur-
rounding the discovery, and the subsequent myths and conspiracy theories. This book
achieves an impartial scholarly appraisal of one of astronomy’s greatest sagas.
Allan Chapman President of the Society for the History of Astronomy

London, UK
Introduction: A Century and a Half of Discovery
and Controversy
The major planet Neptune, outermost ice giant of the outer Solar System, was tele-
scopically discovered by Johann Gottfried Galle and Heinrich Louis d'Arrest at the
Berlin Observatory in September 1846, as a direct consequence of the calculations
of the French mathematical astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier predicting
where to point the telescope. The find—which instantly expanded the size of the
known Solar System by half again—was immediately hailed as one of the most
remarkable in nineteenth-century astronomy and indeed in all the sciences. Why
was it deemed so important?
Thirteen years before, one of the great polymaths of the nineteenth century,
William Whewell, had argued that (1833: xiii)
Astronomy is not only the queen of the sciences, but, in a stricter sense of the term, the only
perfect science; —the only branch of human knowledge in which particulars are completely
subjugated to generals, effects to causes … and we have in this case an example of a science
in that elevated state of flourishing maturity, in which all that remains is to determine with
the extreme of accuracy the consequences of its rules by the profoundest combinations of
mathematics, the magnitude of its data by the minutest scrupulousness of observation; in
which, further, its claims are so fully acknowledged, that the public wealth of every nation
pretending to civilization, the most consummate productions of labour and skill, and the
loftiest and most powerful intellects which appear among men, are gladly and emulously
assigned to the task of adding to its completeness.
And what more spectacular demonstration could there have been of “the most
consummate productions of labour and skill” than the prediction of the existence of,
and subsequent discovery of, a major planet? Here was a stunning example of the
abilities of the “loftiest and most powerful intellects which appear among men” bril-
liantly adding to astronomy’s “completeness.”
Neptune’s discovery had thereby strengthened the belief among astronomers as
well as “men of science” (to use the nineteenth-century term for scientists) of the
truth of the established order in the workings of the cosmos. That order was set on
the foundations of Newton’s law of universal gravitation, for it was calculations
exploiting that law that had disclosed Neptune. When Charles Darwin came to pen
the final sentence of his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection…,
xi
xii Introduction: A Century and a Half of Discovery and Controversy
published in 1859, his momentous account of the working of laws in the natural
world, it was no accident he argued (1859: 490), “whilst this planet has gone cycling
on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms
most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”
The discovery of Neptune, then, as important as it was, was so for reasons that
are not always easy for us to grasp from our early twenty-first-century vantage
point. Now Newton’s universal gravitation, which seemed unassailable then, has
been replaced by Einstein’s general relativity, and the detection of additional bodies
belonging to the outer Solar System (Kuiper belt objects, KBOs) and even of entire
systems of planets (exoplanets) orbiting distant stars has become commonplace.
It is also hard to recall the international rivalries that caused the discovery to be
immediately engulfed in controversies, at first mainly involving fierce disputes
about priority. These disputes subsided once a carefully crafted compromise had
been negotiated allowing the Frenchman Le Verrier and the hitherto unknown
English mathematician John Couch Adams to be regarded as mathematical co-
discoverers of the planet.
The compromise seemed to hold for over a century, with a consensus version of
the story widely accepted and reinforced by works published during the centennial
year of the discovery (1946). But then, in the 1960s, vital papers went missing. The
so-called Neptune file meticulously assembled and kept by the Astronomer Royal
George Biddell Airy had been “misplaced” by a highly distinguished stellar astron-
omer and occasional historian of astronomy, Olin Eggen, who had been referring to
it while writing biographies of Airy and James Challis. Though suspicion that he
was the one who had absconded with the file was general, he repeatedly denied it,
and even the authorities at Cambridge and the Royal Greenwich Observatory were
careful not to lay any finger of blame, for fear that exposure of the fact might lead
to the file’s destruction. Only after he died in 1998 did one of his graduate students
discover it in his flat in Chile. After a more than 30 years’ absence, it was carefully
packed up and returned from Chile to England under the personal care of the librar-
ian of the Cambridge University Library, Adam Perkins. Thirty years is a long time,
and in the meantime, researchers who had wished to consult the file had not only
been inconvenienced, they had found ample room to exercise their suspicions and
imaginations. The main question was this: Did members of the British scientific
establishment, in fact, rewrite the history and steal Neptune from the French?
Without the original documents, and in a post-Watergate world, it did not seem
impossible. History, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and a number of authors with
somewhat paranoid and conspiracy-favoring tendencies sensed a scandal and exer-
cised rather remarkable ingenuity in working out and promoting sensationalistic
revisionist theories. Without the ability to refer to missing documents, it was diffi-
cult to refute them.
Had they been right, this might well have been turned from one of the great tri-
umphs of nineteenth-century science to a complete dismantling of the reputations of
“eminent Victorians” Airy and Challis who, whatever their shortcomings, had
always seemed to value in the highest degree traits of hard work, conscientiousness,
and moral probity. But they were not right. The file’s recovery put paid to their
Introduction: A Century and a Half of Discovery and Controversy xiii
theories. A close study of the original documents filled in a few minor elisions but
frankly offered very little that was genuinely new. Instead, the remarkable accuracy
of the transcript published by the scrupulous and obsessive Airy himself soon after
the discovery was confirmed. The file, which had always seemed an unimpeachable
source of dates and detail, once again could be referred to with confidence, given
secure anchoring to studies of the search for and discovery of Neptune that would
otherwise have been completely at sea. The British, though they might have tried to
spin things in a favorable way to help ensure that their countryman, Adams, got
some share of the credit, did not steal Neptune from the French and then try to cover
up their crime. There was no conspiracy. The conspiracy theories need not concern
us further here: they have now been thoroughly debunked (Hutchins, 2008: 91–95).
Having laid aside these imaginary controversies, we can now turn our attention to
the real controversies which remain.
For the story, though remaining one of the most celebrated and oft-retold in the
history of astronomy, is also one of the most complicated. It has a captivating
theme—the mathematical discovery of a planet that had never yet been seen through
the telescope. As with any such story, this one has multiple strands. The original
documentation of the nineteenth century (including Airy’s “Neptune file”) provides
the bedrock evidence, but that documentation is extraordinarily vast. And although
that documentation—especially Airy’s account to the Royal Astronomical Society
(RAS) which was derived from the file—may be regarded as “eyewitness” in some
sense, here, as everywhere else, what is seen depends on the viewpoint of the
beholder. Does one look at such documentation with a microscope or a fish-eye
lens? What is the appropriate eyepiece with which to detect Neptune in the telescope?
There were major negotiations even at the time of the discovery (beginning, not
least, with Airy) to allocate “priority” and to establish a synoptic view of what had
actually taken place. The international controversy that embroiled British and
French astronomers—tentatively resolved by a carefully brokered consensus to
share credit between the two co-predictors, Adams and Le Verrier—may not seem
as interesting today as it did once. But—as with the controversy in our own time
about Pluto’s planetary status—it generated enormous contemporary interest, some
of it doubtless of the tabloid variety, at the time. And anyone who is interested in
how social and cultural contexts give shape to science will recognize the importance
of uncovering some of the layers, as archaeologists or geologists painstakingly
uncover the strata that hold clues as to the meaning of the past.
Major reassessments of the discovery of Neptune occurred for the centennial in
1946 and sesquicentennial in 1996 (though, in the latter case, these were somewhat
marred by the missing file and the resulting conspiracy theories). There was a brief
revival of interest again in 2011, when the bicentennial of Le Verrier’s birth was
celebrated and the first Neptunian “year” since the discovery was observed.
We have now (in 2019) just celebrated the bicentennial of Adams’s birth, and so
the timing seems right for another reassessment. In addition to being able to refer
again to the original Airy file, which is now in the care of the Royal Greenwich
Observatory archives at the Cambridge University Library, many other documents,
not available to previous researchers, have been recovered and put in some s emblance
xiv Introduction: A Century and a Half of Discovery and Controversy
of order. Significantly, these have included not only British accounts—which,

because of Airy’s central role and to a lesser but still significant extent that of John
Herschel and a few others, had always been rather overrepresented—but also those
of French and German astronomers. Here for the Neptune story, we trace origins,
the shoulders stood upon, and then move forward.
The result has been the introduction of a trove of fresh documentation. In addi-
tion, thanks to the efforts of scholars in several countries, many of whom are con-
tributors to the present volume, we now have a much broader perspective from
which to view the discovery of Neptune than ever before and a better understanding
of what the Neptune story tells us about the practices of science in the mid-nineteenth
century.
It is also fair to say that the methodology of historians of science has advanced
greatly since 1846 or even 1946. In particular, rather than merely chronicling the
past, historians of science have become much more adept at understanding the pro-
cesses by which scientific knowledge is shaped. Instead of focusing only on indi-
vidual “heroes,” historians have come to realize the importance of the way that a
specific scientific problem like the errant motion of Uranus, which led to the discov-
ery of Neptune, brings together a group of individuals in an interactive network. (An
early example of this kind of research is found in Susan Faye Cannon’s paper
“Scientists and Broad Churchmen: An Early Victorian Intellectual Network”
[Cannon, 1964] which provides a model for Robert W. Smith’s Chap. 7 here. [Also
see Smith, 1989.])
The cultures of specific scientific institutions, conditioned by social conditions
and the purposes for which they were established, must be considered. The impor-
tant British institutions were Cambridge University (where Adams did his calcula-
tions), Cambridge University Observatory (which had largely been set moving in a
positive direction by Airy but where his successor, James Challis, was overwhelmed
with responsibilities before undertaking the first telescopic search), and the Royal
Observatory, Greenwich (where—as stressed by Professor Allan Chapman
[Chapman, 1988]—the public service aspect of time-keeping and supporting navi-
gation precluded a purely speculative research purpose such as searching for a
planet). The Paris Observatory and the Bureau of Longitudes were the correspond-
ing centers in France. And in Germany, which was at the time not even a unified
country, the Berlin Observatory played the key role of actually detecting the planet
in the heavens.
Since the network of individuals involved in the calculation and eventual discov-
ery was indeed international and the correspondence remarkably extensive and
rapid in those days of letter-writing (and post-1815 peace in Europe), there are
many threads of communication across the entire European community of scholars
inviting reconstruction. Fortunately, the documentation available is extensive
enough to allow “fine-grained" analyses of events, personalities, and contingent
developments. Cannon (ibid.: 30), thinking of the middle of the nineteenth century
in general, remarked, “we possess the most complete documentation, for selected
individuals, not only that ever has existed but that ever will exist.”
Introduction: A Century and a Half of Discovery and Controversy xv
As a characterization of the middle of the nineteenth century, this still seems

true. On the basis of this extensive documentation, a number of exhaustive studies
have appeared, including Martin J. S. Rudwick’s The Great Devonian Controversy
(Rudwick, 1985) and James A. Secord’s Victorian Sensation (Secord, 2003).
Perhaps with the exception of the publication of the Vestiges of the Natural History
of Creation, no other scientific event was more vigorously discussed during the first
part of the nineteenth century, in Britain at any rate, than the discovery of Neptune.
But the discussion was not only British nor even only British and French. The
Germans played a much more significant role than has previously been recognized;
they were not merely opportunists who happened to have a close prediction and a
good map. And Americans were also involved, as the discovery happened just as
American astronomy, hitherto woefully lagging behind European achievements,
began to come into its own as a first-rank power of astronomical research.
We are only too keenly aware of the truth of the old adage Ars longa, vita brevis.
The amount of material available to Neptunian scholars is both a blessing and a
curse. Such rich materials allow the construction of an almost Dickensian canvas,
with an array of characters fully the equal of any found in a Victorian novel. History
here challenges narrative skill to the utmost and demands something of the art of the
novelist, rather than tacking backward from the known ending of the story, as con-
spiracy theorists and Whiggish historians do.
But tempting as it is, when presented with such inexhaustible resources, to take
shortcuts, we have resisted that temptation. In particular, we have resolved to abstain
from glib character analyses, facile attribution of motive or blame, and all species of
retrospective analyses in general. Rather, we have attempted, as far as humanly pos-
sible, to remain faithful to what the scientists themselves thought they were up to at
the time. We haven’t avoided what might be referred to as “reverse prediction”
entirely, but as a rule, it’s a clumsy device—rather like the appearance of Time
between the third and fourth acts of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale—and we have
tried to avoid it. We have striven always to represent the perspectives of the indi-
viduals involved as they themselves experienced them and of course provided the
international point of view needed given the universal (or at least trans-European)
significance of Neptune’s discovery. To some extent, no doubt, we have failed or
fallen short. But at least it is useful to state clearly our aspirations.
A few comments regarding intended audience: Determining this is a struggle for
any single author, and the difficulties are multiplied in a multiauthored work. The
discovery of Neptune is at once one of the best-known and most attractive subjects
in the history of astronomy—thus one which has always had wide popular appeal—
but it is also one in which the predictions depended upon highly technical mathe-
matical methods (classical perturbation theory). Thus, we have had to find a
compromise between appealing to a broader general audience on the one hand and
to a highly sophisticated, scholarly, but potentially small one on the other. We have
tried our best to strike the right balance. In general, however, we have thought it
better to err on the side of the more general reader—for instance, in Chap. 1, which
provides an overview of topics in celestial mechanics which are needed as back-
ground to understanding the later chapters. Our success is for the reader to decide.
xvi Introduction: A Century and a Half of Discovery and Controversy
In outline, the contents of the book are as follows.

Foreword—Allan Chapman
Introduction: A Century and a Half of Discovery and Controversy—William
Sheehan
Chapter 1. Preliminaries to the Neptune Discovery: Newtonian Gravitational
Theory—William Sheehan
Since the discovery of Neptune represents a high point in the history of celestial
mechanics, Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation is in a real sense a major “hero” of
this story. We present some of the backgrounds involving Newton and his contem-
poraries and explore the way that, in the century after Newton published his
Principia in 1687, Newtonian gravitational theory—largely through elaboration
into the complex methods of perturbations achieved by a series of brilliant mostly
French successors—came to acquire its tremendous prestige.
Chapter 2. Planetary Discoveries Before Neptune: From William Herschel to
the “Celestial Police”—William Sheehan and Clifford J. Cunningham
By the end of the eighteenth century, the Solar System was, at least by present stan-
dards, a rather simple affair. The outermost planet was still, as it had been in antiq-
uity, Saturn. The planets, their moons, and a few periodic comets like Neptune that
moved in very eccentric orbits round the Sun could be fairly represented as moving
according to clockwork. Then in 1781, William Herschel discovered a new planet,
Uranus, and at a single stroke doubled the scale of the known Solar System. Guided
by a strange but seemingly valid “recipe,” the Titius-Bode law that gave the relative
distances of the planets and to which Uranus was quickly accommodated, astrono-
mers began to search for additional planets in the place of a missing number between
Mars and Jupiter. Their search bore fruit with the discovery of the first four “minor
planets.” Meanwhile, celestial mechanicians rather confidently set out to calculate
Uranus’s orbit. By the early 1800s, Uranus was known to be veering off course.
Astronomers gradually became aware of a “crisis” in gravitational theory that would
be resolved only by the discovery of a more remote planet whose existence could be
disclosed only by its disturbances on Uranus. By the early 1820s, elite mathemati-
cians across Europe were aware of the challenge.
Chapter 3. John Couch Adams: From Cornwall to Cambridge—Brian Sheen
and Carolyn Kennett
Of the several mathematicians aware of or attempting to skirmish with the problem
of Uranus, only two, unknown to each other, made serious attempts to attack it.
They were John Couch Adams and Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier. One did so as a
matter of private research; one was set upon it. By 1845, Le Verrier had already
made his mark in research in his professional post at the Paris Observatory and
thereby gained the support of his director, François Arago, who set him full-time on
the Uranus problem. Adams, who in contrast to Le Verrier has not yet been the sub-
ject of a scholarly biography, grew up in somewhat impecunious circumstances in
Cornwall; but he was nurtured, encouraged, and supported by a loving family so
Introduction: A Century and a Half of Discovery and Controversy xvii
that, while quiet by nature and inconspicuous because he was poor and diligent
rather than a social set rowdy as a Cambridge undergraduate, he was self-assured
and ambitious for his mathematics which he saw as a path to helping his hard-
pressed family. Thus, he possessed assurance and ambition which allowed him to
flourish in the very demanding academic milieu at Cambridge and to tackle one of
the most challenging and complex problems in astronomy as described in Chap. 4.
This chapter’s explanation of Adams’s pre-Cambridge years is thus essential to a
full understanding of him and his subsequent achievements.
Chapter 4. John Couch Adams: From a Senior Wrangler to the Quest for an
Unknown Planet—William Sheehan
This chapter explains for the first time the onerous studies of an ambitious Maths
Tripos undergraduate at Cambridge and the dominating duties and responsibilities
required of him as a junior fellow and tutor, for which he was paid. These duties and
responsibilities, which Adams took very seriously and prioritized above all else,
constrained his personal research to vacations and inhibited the evolution of his
relations and correspondence with senior astronomers such as Cambridge University
Observatory astronomer James Challis and the Astronomer Royal George Biddell
Airy. As early as 1841, while still an undergraduate at St. John’s College at
Cambridge, he became intrigued by the problem of Uranus’s wayward motion, but
only in 1843, when he completed his degree with high honors and was appointed a
fellow at St. John’s, did he take it up in earnest. Doing almost all the work during
the vacations, he completed several calculations which gradually refined his solu-
tions, until in October 1845, he had the solution later to become famous as it identi-
fied the position of the planet within two-and-a-half degrees of its discovery position.
He then tried, without success, to meet the Astronomer Royal George Biddell Airy
at the latter’s residence at Greenwich and to present the results of his researches.
The well-known stories of his near miss and subsequent failure to respond to Airy’s
“radius vector question” are reanalyzed here in terms of newly discovered docu-
mentation and challenge long-held stereotypes of Adams’s relationships with
Challis and Airy.
Chapter 5. Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier: Predictions Leading to Discovery—
James Lequeux
This chapter, based on the magisterial biography of Le Verrier (Lequeux, 1990),
outlines how the French mathematician—older and better established than Adams
and with no knowledge of the latter’s existence—set out on his own extensive cal-
culations and arrived at a set of elements and a position for a planet beyond Uranus
which he published in June 1846. It was this publication, coming into the hands of
Airy, who immediately recognized its similarity to that Adams had dropped off at
Greenwich the previous October, that led to a sudden acceleration of activity that
included the organization of a search over that summer by Challis with Cambridge’s
large Northumberland refractor, the publication of a revised calculation and position
by Le Verrier at the end of August, and events set in motion that would lead to the
planet’s discovery in Berlin.
xviii Introduction: A Century and a Half of Discovery and Controversy
Chapter 6. “That Star Is Not on the Map”: The German Side of the Discovery—
Davor Krajnović
The planet was discovered at the Berlin Observatory after a short search of the
region of the sky indicated by Le Verrier, by Johann Galle and Heinrich d’Arrest on
September 23, 1846. They had an advantage over Challis in that they were in pos-
session of the latest and by chance the most relevant one of a set of Berlin star charts
that had not yet been published to astronomers elsewhere. Of the multiple threads of
the Neptune story, this one is in some ways the least known, and this chapter draws
extensively on German primary and published sources to contextualize the discov-
ery within the wider culture of German astronomy during this period.
Chapter 7. Clashing Interests: The Cambridge Network and International
Controversies—Robert W. Smith
Immediately after the announcement of the discovery of the new planet in Berlin
and while Airy was still vacationing on the Continent, a tremendous national and
international furore erupted when several Cambridge alumni or university gran-
dees—not including Adams and not all astronomers—immediately and without
coordination claimed co-discovery for him, along with the right to name the planet.
These claims, and the subsequent correspondence underlying them, are clear evi-
dence of an informal “Cambridge network” of Cambridge University alumni,
fiercely loyal to and like-minded by their social conditioning and common mathe-
matical training and achievements, who saw this discovery as a particularly vital
Cambridge interest and thereby an English one.
The activities of the Cambridge network, which significantly were launched only
after Neptune had been recognized from Berlin, raise the whole question of what
constitutes priority in discovery. The network’s patronage and diverse interests, and
eruption into rare and wide public visibility, brought to the fore the somewhat
embarrassing question as to why other British astronomers, not associated with
Cambridge, were not encouraged to join the search for the predicted new planet.
Airy, as Astronomer Royal with an extensive array of correspondents both in Britain
and the Continent, was in a unique position and took a complete grip in managing
from a national point of view the disastrous situation of the discovery having been
made in Berlin on the basis of a French mathematician’s calculations. He largely
succeeded in controlling the narrative and assuring that Adams received a negoti-
ated share of the credit. This chapter, documented with much private correspon-
dence revealing how astronomers and participants really felt about these most public
events, thus provides the most complete explanation so far offered of the English
claims on Neptune, within the contemporary context of social status, deference,
Cambridge elitism, nationalism, and international attitudes to discovery and priority
in this era of revolution in the sciences, so that the participants are understood within
their own milieu.
Chapter 8. Neptune Examined: William Lassell, a Satellite, and Neptune’s
“Ring”—Robert W. Smith and (the late) Richard Baum
William Lassell was one of the greatest of the “Grand Amateurs,” men of wealth and
independence who built large telescopes and wielded them largely in pursuit of their
Introduction: A Century and a Half of Discovery and Controversy xix
own personal researches (in contrast to the national observatories whose duties and
functions were more circumscribed). He was not a Cambridge man, but he was a
close friend of several, especially Sir John Herschel, and was just deploying a new
large telescope when the planet came to light in Berlin. Ambitious and wanting to
burnish his own credentials, Lassell set out at Herschel’s bidding to try to discover
a satellite of Neptune, an important and useful challenge as if successful it would
lead directly to calculation of the planet’s mass. The latter was not only of interest
in its own right but would provide a check on the calculations of Le Verrier and
Adams. He succeeded within a week in discovering Triton, as Neptune’s large satel-
lite was later to become known. Nevertheless, this proof of Lassell’s ability and
instrument quality raises the question of why others apart from Challis were not
primed to search. While attempting to confirm the existence of Triton, Lassell was
vouchsafed impressions of something more—a possible ring of Neptune. As
explained here, the latter has nothing to do with the planet’s actual system of spidery
rings and was eventually recognized to be nothing more than an illusion produced
by spurious optical effects.
Chapter 9. Neptune’s Orbit: Reassessing Celestial Mechanics—William
Sheehan and Kenneth Young
In the immediate aftermath of the discovery of Neptune, the calculation of its orbit
was of the utmost importance. Several of the most important investigators were
Americans, one of whom was Sears Cook Walker, whose orbit was, in a rather
alarming degree, dissimilar to those predicted by Le Verrier and Adams. Walker’s
researches led another American, Benjamin Peirce, to question the validity of the
European calculations altogether and to maintain that the discovery of Neptune had
been a mere “happy accident.” Adams attempted to refute Peirce’s claims, and later,
astronomers continued to press the same methods that had led to the spectacular
discovery into service in the quest for additional planets. Le Verrier analyzed
Mercury’s anomalously precessing perihelion in terms of an inner planet, “Vulcan.”
Other astronomers, notably Percival Lowell, extended the purview of celestial
mechanics into the outer Solar System and used Adams’s and Le Verrier’s methods
to try to track down a planet beyond Neptune. It has only been since about 1990,
with the advent of newer methods of doing celestial mechanics, that it has finally
become possible to determine the limits of validity of the methods Le Verrier and
Adams used. Their calculations were valid—but only within rather specific circum-
stances that were realized in the decades before and after Uranus’s and Neptune’s
conjunctions in 1821 (Lai, Lam, and Young, 1990). Thus, though not exactly in the
same sense argued by Peirce, the discovery of Neptune was indeed a “happy acci-
dent,” and the approach that led to its discovery was a one-off that has never been
repeated. Meanwhile, Vulcan has been shown to be nonexistent, and the anomalies
of its motion satisfactorily accounted for by Albert Einstein’s general theory of rela-
tivity. Hence, this chapter reassesses for the first time the methods of both Adams
and Le Verrier and the unknown coincidences in celestial mechanics that allowed
their successful calculations and also helps to explain how their discovery motivated
the extraordinary efforts of elite astronomers to reprise this success in the decades
that followed.
xx Introduction: A Century and a Half of Discovery and Controversy
Chapter 10. Neptune Visited and the Outer Solar System Revolutionised,
1989–2019—William Sheehan
The discovery of Neptune marked the end of one quest—that of satisfactorily
explaining, in terms of Newtonian gravitational theory, the wayward motions of
Uranus—and the beginning of another, the quest to fill in the map and understand
the nature of the contents of the outer Solar System whose icy precincts Neptune, as
the outermost of the giant planets, bounds. Though the attempt to find planets
beyond Neptune by analyzing remaining “residuals” in the motions of Uranus and
Neptune would prove unsuccessful, Clyde Tombaugh, pursuing with dogged deter-
mination and thoroughness an empirical photographic survey of the sky in search of
Percival Lowell’s putative “Planet X,” did manage to find a small “planet,” Pluto, in
1930, which for a time was thought perhaps to answer to the description. We now
know that Pluto is too tiny to have produced any significant disturbances in Uranus
or Neptune; its discovery was indeed a “happy accident”—and, as is now known,
Tombaugh had merely stumbled upon by far the brightest member of the Kuiper belt
of icy objects that swarm beyond Neptune’s orbit. Since 1990, the use of powerful
new imaging technologies and gigantic telescopes has rapidly begun to fill in what
had hitherto seemed nearly empty spaces with a plethora of icy debris known as
Kuiper belt objects (KBOs). They represent a complicated bestiary, and their char-
acteristics provide important clues to the history of how the Solar System came to
acquire the structure it has. This brings us to an exciting frontier that has begun to
be explored only in the last twenty-some years, in which giant planet migrations in
the early Solar System played a role, and which tantalizingly hints at the existence
of at least one more giant planet, far beyond Neptune. Neptune was a high point of
the history of astronomy of the nineteenth century. If past is prologue, the future
chapters of this story remaining to be told in the twenty-first century may well be
more exciting than those that have already been told.
Flagstaff, AZ, USA William Sheehan

Acknowledgments
Allan Chapman of Wadham College, Oxford, has very generously written a fore-
word for the book. What Allan brought to the table long ago was his unique appre-
ciation of Airy’s personality, official role and responsibility, and modus operandi. In
the aftermath of Neptune’s discovery, Airy was scapegoated and has been derided
by too many historians since (just as Challis has). For more than 30 years, Allan has
quietly used every opportunity to emphasize a holistic understanding of the man
beyond the Neptune affair which caricatured him and also his very many achieve-
ments. We hope that something of Allan’s work in getting us to understand this
history and its players, appreciate the science, and perceive stumbles by several of
the principal actors as just the human errors we all make has informed what we have
written here.
Carolyn Kennett and Trudy E. Bell have been far more than editors and have
gilded everything they touched. Carolyn contributed very many thoughtful editing
suggestions and query resolutions, especially the vast painstaking work of standard-
izing the multiauthor text in order to achieve enjoyable flow for the great and com-
plex narrative offered here. Trudy contributed her expertise regarding the role that
Neptune played in the early years after its discovery in helping launch American
astronomy onto the international stage. She sparked a friendly debate, which feeds
significantly into Chap. 9. Our colleague, Roger Hutchins, has generously given of
his limited time and unlimited expertise, reading and commenting on the manu-
script several times. Bernard J. Sheehan helped produce the excellent translation
into English of James Lequeux’s biography of Le Verrier, which we have followed
here. Guy Bertrand and Jacques Laskar at the Institut de mécanique céleste et de
calcul des éphémérides (IMCCE) in Paris have shared research in progress and
greatly enriched the discussion of the perturbation methods used by Le Verrier. We
are grateful to H. M. Lai and C. C. Lam for allowing us to summarize and use fig-
ures from their 1990 paper with Kenneth Young, which marked a new era in under-
standing the limits of the calculations whereby Le Verrier and Adams predicted the
position of Neptune. In the rapidly developing area of current research into the
contents and evolutionary history of the outer Solar System, Dale P. Cruikshank of
NASA Ames, Konstantin Batygin of Caltech (California Institute of Technology),
xxi
xxii Acknowledgments
and Greg Laughlin of Yale provided indispensable insights. They also generously
shared researches in progress without which Chap. 10 could never have been writ-
ten, as well as making accessible some very esoteric regions of higher mathematics.
In addition, much help was provided in finding illustrations, as duly acknowledged
in the credits. However, we are especially grateful to Lauren Amundson, archivist at
Lowell Observatory, for her kind assistance.
References
Cannon, S.A., 1964. Scientists and Broad Churchmen: an early Victorian intellectual network.
Journal of British Studies, 4:65–88.
Chapman, A., 1988. Private Research and Public Duty: George Biddell Airy and the Search for
Neptune. Journal for the History of Astronomy, xix:121–139.
Darwin, C., 1859. The Origin of Species. London, John Murray.
Hutchins, R., 2008. British University Observatories 1772–1939. Aldershot, Ashgate.
Lai, H.M. Lam, C.C., and Young, K., 1990. Perturbations of Uranus by Neptune: a modern per-
spective. American Journal of Physics, 58(10):946–953.
Lequeux, J., 2013. Le Verrier—Magnificent and Detestable Astronomer. New York, Springer.
Rudwick, M.J.S., 1985. The Great Devonian Controversy: the shaping of scientific knowledge
among gentlemanly specialists. Chicago and London, University of Chicago.
Secord, J.A., 2003. Victorian Sensation the extraordinary publication, reception, and secret
authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago and London, University of
Chicago.
Smith, R.W., 1989. The Cambridge Network in Action: the discovery of Neptune. ISIS, 8:395–422.
Whewell, W., 1833. Address, Report of the Third Meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science; Held at Cambridge. London, British Association for the Advancement
of Science:xi–xxii.
Contents
1 Preliminaries to the Neptune Discovery: Newtonian

Gravitational Theory �� 1
William Sheehan
1.1 The Road to Neptune�� 1
1.2 The Inverse Square�� 2
1.3 Newton’s Headache: The Theory of the Moon �� 10
1.4 Stars in the Moon’s Way �� 14
1.5 A Tide in His Affairs Pulls Newton Back to the Moon�� 19
1.6 The Calculus �� 25
1.7 The Inverse Square Law: Crisis and Resolution �� 27
1.8 The Return of the Comet�� 29
Appendix 1.1�� 37
References�� 39
2 Planetary Discoveries Before Neptune: From William Herschel
to the “Celestial Police” �� 41
William Sheehan and Clifford J. Cunningham
2.1 A Date with Destiny: William Herschel Discovers Uranus�� 42
2.2 The Search for Pre-Discovery Observations�� 49
2.3 A Strange Progression Revealed�� 54
2.4 Uranus Veers as Bouvard Calculates�� 63
2.5 The Stuff of Legend: Airy�� 68
2.6 Hussey’s Brazen Idea�� 73
2.7 Valz and Nicolai Give Chase, while Wartmann
Finds a Suspect �� 76
2.8 Astronomers Gather More Clues�� 78
References�� 81
3 John Couch Adams: From Cornwall to Cambridge�� 83
Brian Sheen and Carolyn Kennett
3.1 A Cornish Childhood�� 83
3.2 Schooling of the Young Adams�� 86
xxiii
xxiv Contents
3.3 Adams the Young Astronomer�� 88

3.4 Preparations for University �� 94
References�� 98
4 John Couch Adams: From Senior Wrangler to the Quest
for an Unknown Planet�� 101
William Sheehan
4.1 A New Retelling of an Oft-Told Tale�� 102
4.2 Adams Enters Cambridge �� 105
4.3 Tale of the Tripos�� 106
4.4 Adams Embarks on an Honourable Quest�� 109
4.5 Adams and His Tutor�� 116
4.6 Uranus Looms�� 119
4.7 “A Mass of Comet Reductions I Scarcely Know How
to Get Through”�� 126
4.8 Adams Calculates�� 131
4.9 A Place in the Sky�� 141
4.10 The Radius Vector and a Year Without a Conclusion�� 143
4.11 The Ball Is Dropped, and a Comet Splits �� 149
Appendix 4.1 A Brief History of Mathematics at Cambridge �� 152
References�� 155
5 Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier: Predictions Leading
to Discovery�� 159
James Lequeux
5.1 The Problem of the Motion of Uranus�� 159
5.2 Urbain Le Verrier�� 162
5.3 Le Verrier’s Work on Perturbations of Uranus�� 165
5.4 Neptune Discovered�� 169
5.5 The Competition �� 175
5.6 Janus, Oceanus, Neptune or Le Verrier? �� 179
6 “That Star is Not on the Map”: The German Side
of the Discovery�� 185
Davor Krajnović
6.1 Introduction�� 186
6.2 Laying the Groundwork�� 188
6.3 Bessel’s Verification of Newton’s Theory of Gravitation �� 189
6.4 Bessel’s Unfinished Project�� 194
6.5 Charting the Skies �� 197
6.6 The Discovery in Berlin�� 204
6.7 The Aftermath �� 215
6.8 German Contribution�� 229
Contents xxv
7 Clashing Interests: The Cambridge Network and International

Controversies�� 245
Robert W. Smith
7.1 A New Interpretation�� 246
7.2 What Is a Discovery?�� 248
7.3 The Cambridge Search: Clandestine or Pragmatic? �� 251
7.4 Other Observers?�� 260
7.5 Battles over Credit�� 262
7.6 Managing the Discovery: Airy’s Matter of “Delicacy”�� 271
7.7 Managing the Discovery: John Herschel’s Despair
and Realism�� 275
7.8 What Counts as a Publication? �� 281
7.9 Exploiting the Discovery and Wider Impact�� 286
7.10 Americans Assert a Happy Accident! �� 289
7.11 Conclusions�� 291
8 Neptune Examined: William Lassell, a Satellite,
and Neptune’s “Ring”�� 297
Robert W. Smith and Richard Baum
8.1 A Satellite�� 297
8.2 Discovery and Confirmation of a Neptunian Ring�� 300
8.3 The Fading Vision �� 304
8.4 What Happened?�� 308
8.5 Conclusions�� 312
9 Neptune’s Orbit: Reassessing Celestial Mechanics�� 317
William Sheehan and Kenneth Young
9.1 Neptune’s Discovery Revisited: A Happy Accident?�� 318
9.2 Counterattack�� 326
9.3 Setting the Record Straight: Adams Responds �� 331
9.4 A New Test of Celestial Mechanics: Vulcan�� 333
9.5 Other Planets Beyond Neptune? �� 337
9.6 The Quest Continues�� 340
9.7 Searches Far and Wide�� 352
10 Neptune Visited and the Outer Solar System
Revolutionised, 1989–2019�� 361
William Sheehan
10.1 Grand Tour�� 362
10.2 Resonances, the Nice Model, and Neptune’s Migrations �� 370
10.3 Discovering the Kuiper Belt�� 371
xxvi Contents
10.4 Discovery of Exoplanets Revolutionises

Celestial Mechanics�� 375
10.5 A Grand Idea: Jupiter’s “Grand Tack”�� 378
10.6 Grand Tack Created Diversity in the Kuiper Belt �� 379
10.7 A Major Planet Beyond Neptune?: Twenty-First
Century Version�� 382
Name Index�� 389
Subject Index�� 397

About the Editors
Lead Editor
William Sheehan retired after 30 years in practice as

a psychiatrist, earned his MD from the University of
Minnesota (1987). He has written or coauthored more
than 20 books about astronomy and history of science,
including In Search of Planet Vulcan (with Richard
Baum) (1997), the first full-length history of the quest
for Le Verrier’s intra-Mercurial planet, and Discovering
Pluto: Exploration at the Edge of the Solar System
(with Dale Cruikshank) (2018). He is a contributing
editor for Sky & Telescope, has twice been Cox
Memorial lecturer for the Society for the History of
Astronomy, was a 2001 fellow of the John Simon
Guggenheim Foundation, and was awarded the Gold
Medal of the Oriental Astronomical Association (2004)
for his work on Mars. He is a member of IAU’s
Working Group on Planetary System Nomenclature.
Asteroid 16037 was named in his honor.
xxvii
xxviii About the Editors
Editors
Trudy E. Bell contributing editor for Sky & Telescope

and member of the editorial board for Springer’s
Historical & Cultural Astronomy series of books,
earned her MA in the history of science and American
intellectual history from New York University (1978).
Her particular research interest is nineteenth-century
US astronomy. The author or coauthor of a dozen
books, she has been a senior writer for the University
of California High-Performance AstroComputing
Center and an editor for Scientific American and IEEE
Spectrum magazines. Her journalism and research
awards include the David N. Schramm Award from the
American Astronomical Society (2006) and the Herbert
C. Pollock Award of the Dudley Observatory (2004
and 2007). Asteroid 323552 was named in her honor.
Carolyn Kennett, FRAS is a writer, researcher, and

astronomer who lives in the southwest of England.
Until 2020 she was the co-editor of the Society for the
History of Astronomy Bulletin. She delivers creative
engagement opportunities for history, science, and
astronomy as a director of Mayes Creative Ltd. and a
director of Cornwall Sea to Stars. She runs her own
business, Archaeoastronomy Cornwall.
Robert W. Smith is a professor of history at the

University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. He has
written extensively on the history of astronomy from
the eighteenth century to the present day and wrote his
first paper related to the discovery of Neptune in 1984.
He is the recipient of the 2020 LeRoy E. Doggett Prize
for the history of astronomy, awarded by the American
Astronomical Society’s Historical Astronomy
Division.
About the Editors xxix
Additional Contributors
Richard Baum was a leading British historian of

astronomy until his death in 2017, specializing in pris-
ing out wayward episodes of astronomical history. He
was the author of The Planets: Some Myths and
Realities, In Search of Planet Vulcan (with William
Sheehan), and The Haunted Observatory. He was
recipient of the Walter Goodacre Medal (2006) and the
Lydia A. Brown Medal (1988) of the British
Astronomical Association.
Allan Chapman is a historian of science at Oxford

University, with a special interest in the history of
astronomy. He has written 13 books and numerous
academic articles and made several television pro-
grams. He has received honorary doctorates and awards
from the Universities of Central Lancashire, Salford,
and Lancaster and in 2015 was presented with the
Jackson-Gwilt Medal by the Royal Astronomical
Society. His books include Dividing the Circle: The
Development of Critical Angular Measurement in
Astronomy, 1500–1850 (1990, 1995), Astronomical
Instruments and Their Users (1996), The Victorian
Amateur Astronomer: Independent Astronomical
Research in Britain 1820–1920 (1998, 2017), Mary
Somerville and the World of Science (2004, 2015),
England’s Leonardo: Robert Hooke and the
Seventeenth-Century Scientific Revolution (2005),
Stargazers: Copernicus, Galileo, the Telescope, and
the Church—The Astronomical Renaissance,
1500–1700 (2014), and Comets, Cosmology, and the
Big Bang: A History of Astronomy from Edmond Halley
to Edwin Hubble, 1700–2000 (2018).
xxx About the Editors
Clifford J. Cunningham earned his PhD in history of

astronomy at the University of Southern Queensland,
where he is a research fellow. He has written several
monographs on the history of asteroid research, includ-
ing Discovery of the First Asteroid, Ceres; Bode’s Law
and the Discovery of Juno; Studies of Pallas in the
Early Nineteenth Century; and Investigating the Origin
of the Asteroids and Early Findings on Vesta. Asteroid
4276 is named in his honor.
Davor Krajnović received his PhD in astronomy at

Leiden University in 2004, with a dissertation on early-
type galaxies. He was a postdoctoral researcher at
Oxford University; a junior research fellow at The
Queen’s College, Oxford; a fellow at the European
Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany; and a
postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz-Institut für
Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP), Germany. Since 2019, he
is a tenured scientist at AIP, whose current research
topics of interest are related to galaxy formation and
evolution. In 2013, as a member of the SAURON team,
he received the Royal Astronomical Society Group
Achievement Award. He was a co-principal investiga-
tor of the ATLAS3D Project and currently is co-lead-
ing the M3G Survey, investigating the most massive
galaxies in the universe. He authored more than 150
scientific papers, and his serious side interest has been
the history of astronomy.
James Lequeux completed his PhD thesis in radio

astronomy in 1962 and was an assistant, then associate,
professor of physics and astronomy at Paris University
until 1966. He was an astronomer from 1966 to 1999
and an invited scientist at the California Institute of
Technology from 1968 to 1969. He was also the direc-
tor of the Marseilles Observatory from 1983 to 1988
and was editor-in-chief of the journal Astronomy &
Astrophysics for 15 years. Since his retirement in 1999,
he has devoted himself to research and writing about
the history of astronomy, and his books include
acclaimed biographies of Urbain Jean Joseph Le
Verrier, François Aragox, and Hippolyte Fizeau. He is
a member of the editorial board for Springer’s
Historical & Cultural Astronomy series of books.
About the Editors xxxi
Brian Sheen, FRAS a retired research chemist, is on

the RAS Heritage Committee and a member of their
newly formed Policy Group. A long-time John Couch
Adams scholar, he is director of the Roseland
Observatory in Cornwall and on the Board of Cornwall
Sea to Stars.
Kenneth Young emeritus professor of physics at the

Chinese University of Hong Kong, obtained his BS in
physics and his PhD in physics and mathematics from
Caltech. He is a fellow of the American Physical
Society. He and his colleague H. M. Lai and student
C. C. Lam authored an influential paper on the pertur-
bations of Neptune on Uranus in 1990.
Chapter 1
Preliminaries to the Neptune Discovery:
Newtonian Gravitational Theory
William Sheehan
Abstract The discovery of Neptune stunned the 19th century world. It involved the
mathematical prediction of the existence of a major planet never yet seen through a
telescope, because of the way it seemed to be pulling on a known planet, Uranus,
away from its predicted orbit. When an actual planet was discovered near the pre-
dicted position, it was famously hailed as the greatest triumph of Isaac Newton’s
theory of gravitation.
How did they do it? Largely by standing on the shoulders of giants—a dazzling
succession of 18th century mathematicians, many of them French—who had to
overcome many roadblocks in solving difficult problems, some of which had given
Newton himself headaches. In so doing they developed celestial mechanics, the
branch of mathematical astronomy that would later point the way to Neptune.
1.1 The Road to Neptune
One might set off from many different starting points to Neptune. Its discovery was
perhaps inevitable, though the road taken was certainly not. Most accounts begin
with William Herschel’s (1738–1822) telescopic discovery of Uranus in March
1781. For the first time it became clear that a vast frontier of the outer Solar System,
unsuspected by the ancients, who had circumscribed it within the orbit of Saturn, the
outermost of the bright planets visible to the naked eye. The possibility of still other
planets gradually came into the view of astronomers—though the view was not one
of sight in the usual sense, but rather of something more akin to feeling. Some body
(or bodies) was pulling on Uranus from beyond. The nature of the pull was formu-
lated in terms of Isaac Newton’s (1643–1727) theory of gravitation, and compli-
cated formulae defined the pull in terms of the perturbations of each body in the
Solar System acting on every other. These formulae were used by mathematicians
W. Sheehan ()
Independent Scholar, Flagstaff, AZ, USA
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
W. Sheehan et al. (eds.), Neptune: From Grand Discovery to a World Revealed,
Historical & Cultural Astronomy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54218-4_1
2 W. Sheehan
to discern the mass, orbital parameters and ultimately the position of the unknown
planet in one of the most spectacular journeys ever taken by the human mind. It was
a journey that would lead to the discovery of the planet we now know as Neptune in
1846—“with the tip of a pen”, as the French astronomer François Arago (1786–1853)
would unforgettably express it (Lequeux, 2015:50).
It is useful, however, to begin a bit farther back, with the theory of gravitation
itself, from its first conception, to its initial triumphs and disappointments, and
finally to its elaboration in perturbation theory. That puts us almost a century farther
back from the discovery of Uranus.
1.2 The Inverse Square
In August 1684, Edmond Halley (1656–1742), a leading member of London’s

Royal Society, set out for Cambridge. He was still a very young man—not yet 30,
but already a notable figure, with an unusually ebullient personality given the rather
dour, obsessive, hardworking and depressive circle of other geniuses he moved in.
He has been described as “witty, strikingly attractive … adventuresome, outgoing,
a scholar, a drinking man, the sort of person whose rumoured affairs with women
were the subject of talk at the University.” (Manuel, 1968:301). Already, at the cal-
low age of 21, he had left Oxford without taking a degree and impetuously set sail
for St. Helena, the isolated, sparsely vegetated rocky island in the Atlantic off the
west coast of Africa where Napoleon would later be exiled after Waterloo. There he
spent a productive year mapping the southern skies with a 5 ½-foot sextant, a 2-foot
quadrant, a pendulum clock, and a 24-foot telescope. His star catalogue, Catalogue
Stellarum Australium, published in 1679, won praise from John Flamsteed
(1646–1719), the first Astronomer Royal (as the director of the Royal Observatory,
Greenwich, was known) who called Halley “our southern Tycho.” (Unfortunately,
they soon came to detest each other.) (Fig. 1.1).
Fig. 1.1 Edmond Halley,

in about 1687, by Thomas
Murray (Credit: Royal
Society)
1 Preliminaries to the Neptune Discovery: Newtonian Gravitational Theory 3
Halley’s trip to Cambridge was a follow on to a meeting that took place in

London on the evening of 14 January 1683/84 (Old Style). With two other promi-
nent members of the Royal Society, Christopher Wren (1632–1723), the immediate
past-President of the Royal Society who was now largely occupied with architec-
tural projects (notably, St. Paul’s) and Robert Hooke (1635–1703), the Society’s
curator and Wren’s sometime architectural associate, they engaged in a lively dis-
cussion not about politics or religion but planetary orbits. (Westfall, 1980:402). The
subject under discussion had implications for the architecture of the heavens. As
Halley afterwards recalled,
…and this I know to be true, that in January 1683/84, I having from the sesquialtera (i.e.,
3/2 power) proportion of Kepler, concluded that the centripetall force decreased in the pro-
portion of the squares of the distances reciprocally, came one Wednesday to town, where I
met with Sr. Christ. Wren and Mr Hook, and falling in discourse about it, Mr Hook affirmed
that upon that principle all the Laws of the celestiall motions were to be demonstrated.
(Newton, Correspondence, II:442)
Hooke, in other words, claimed to have used an inverse square law of force to
explain the planets’ motion in elliptical orbits. The fact of the elliptical orbits had
been established by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), and Kepler had even attempted
to explain why they were elliptical by means of magnetic forces emanating from the
Sun, though the idea was never accepted (Dreyer, 1953:305). He had also published
the crucial sesquialetra proportion (as Halley refers to it) related to the distances and
periods of the planets. (Today referred to as Kepler’s harmonic law, or third law of
planetary motion, though Kepler himself did not so refer to it.) Doubting Hooke’s
claim, Wren offered the prize of a book worth forty shillings to whomever could
produce a rigorous mathematical demonstration of this result, but Wren’s stipulated
time-limit of two months expired with the prize still unclaimed. That summer,
Halley’s father disappeared under rather mysterious circumstances (he was found
dead five weeks later, and was probably murdered), and Halley had to attend to
these pressing family affairs, which included managing his father’s estate (Cook,
1998:137–140). While dealing with this decidedly unpleasant business, Halley
came within range of Cambridge, and taking advantage of proximity, decided to
drop in to put the question of the inverse-square to the Royal Society’s consummate
mathematician, Isaac Newton.
When Halley came to visit, Newton had already been thinking about gravitation
for some time. In old age (but Newton in old age is not always a reliable source) he
told the antiquarian William Stukeley (1687–1765) (Stukeley, 1936:19–20) that his
thinking on gravity was first “occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contem-
plative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground
[and] constantly to the earth’s centre. There must be a drawing power…” He gave a
somewhat fuller account along the same lines to the exiled French Huguenot writer
Pierre Des Maizeaux (1666–1745), in which he seemed to suggest (Westfall,
1993:40) that in 1665–66 he had combined a formula for centrifugal force—the
“endeavour from the centre of a body revolving in a circle”—with Kepler’s har-
monic law to arrive at an inverse-square law for gravity. (The formula for centrifu-
gal force had already been derived by Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) in 1659.
4 W. Sheehan
Fig. 1.2 Isaac Newton, in

1689, after the Godfrey
Kneller portrait in the
possession of the Earl of
Portsmouth, Farleigh
Wallop, Basingstoke,
Hampshire (Credit:
Wikipedia Commons)
However, before Huygens published the result, in 1673, Newton had found it inde-
pendently, using a different method, in 1665–66.) (Fig. 1.2).
In 1665–66, Newton, then an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, had
left the university because of the Plague. Like other scholars and fellows, Newton
was provided with a small subsistence allowance while away, and Newton is pre-
sumed to have returned to his mother’s home in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, and
there, supposedly in the garden, sat under the apple tree which started his train of
thoughts. That he left Cambridge is certain, but there is some evidence that he spent
the plague years not at Woolsthorpe but at his uncle’s house in Boothby, the only
place he is known to have stayed and where there was a large garden with an exten-
sive copse of trees out back. (Newton, 1989:xi). Famously, he did a back-of-envelope
calculation in which he tried to compare the force of gravity at the surface of the
Earth with the Moon’s “endeavour to recede” as a way of testing an inverse-square
law, and found the latter to be “4,000 and more times greater,” not 3,600 as it ought
to have been according to an inverse-square law. Newton would later claim that the
failure of this calculation was owing to his having used an inaccurate value for the
length of a degree of terrestrial latitude. This was true enough, though he could eas-
ily have corrected his calculation once better values were available—notably, from
Jean Picard’s triangulation between Paris and the clocktower of Sourdon, published
in 1671 and evidently known to Newton within the same year. Instead, Newton let
the matter drop (and did not use the Picard measure of the Earth to do a recalcula-
tion until 1684–5. (Westfall, 1980:420–421). The reason for this seems to be that at
this time he was still a disciple of the vortex theory of the French mathematician and
philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), whose central idea was of “matter in
motion” and which posited “a universe in which vortices [tourbillons] of matter fill
space and all moving bodies are borne along in the swirl, the planets … trapped in
the solar whirlpool” (Whiteside, 1970a:10). Thus, he would not then have expected
the calculation to come out exactly. Rather, if, as he then believed, the motions of
the Moon and planets were due to a mixture of gravity and “Cartesius’s [Descartes’]
Vortices”, then, as Curtis Wilson has pointed out (Wilson, 2002:206), “the supposi-
tion of vortices with their hydrodynamical complexities could hardly fail to give rise
to doubts about the mathematical accuracy of … elliptical orbits.” (For more on the
Cartesian vortex theory, see: Aiton, 1989:206).
Newton’s thinking might have continued to swirl endlessly in Cartesian vortices,
then, were it not for the sudden interposition, in the winter of 1679/80, of Robert
Hooke. Hooke was a remarkable genius in his own right who has, unfortunately,
long been in Newtonian eclipse. No portrait of him exists; perhaps one never did,
though the sour relations between the two men is attested by a story, probably
unfounded, that Newton as president of the Royal Society got rid of the one (or pos-
sibly two) in its possession. (Jardine, 2003:15.) They had corresponded by fits and
starts for many years, and Hooke, in November 1679, serving as secretary of the
Royal Society and attempting to breathe some life into an organization that had
become rather moribund, revived his correspondence with the then notoriously
reclusive scholar whose favourite studies were biblical chronology, the Book of
Revelation, and alchemy. To pique Newton’s interest Hooke threw out a number of
ideas, of which the most fruitful was his suggestion that Newton try, in place of
thinking about aether-gravity along Cartesian lines, “compounding the celestiall
motions of the planets of a direct [i.e., straight] motion by the tangent & an attrac-
tive motion.” About this suggestion, Derek T. Whiteside, the great student of
Newtonian mathematics, says:
Had Hooke added in a final rider that Kepler’s area law was to be understood to be exact, he
would have been handing Newton on a platter the essence of a complete solution to the
problem of planetary motion, since all then remaining to do would have been for him
adroitly to employ his mathematician’s skill to good effect, as he was well able to. Newton
in reply rather grudgingly thanked Hooke for his letter, and in a spirit of reciprocity sent an
attempt to discover the Earth’s rotation by analysing the way a body would fall if dropped
from a height above the Earth. He found it to be a spiral. Hooke, however, found that
Newton had made an error, and corrected him. Newton was a dangerous man to correct. He
took it as a personal affront. Nevertheless, Hooke had done his work by providing the goad
which, as Newton later told Halley (Newton to Halley, 27 July 1686; Newton,
Correspondence, II:447), “occasioned my finding the Theorem by which I afterward exam-
ined the Ellipsis’ of the planetary orbits.” Always a grudging debtor, he admitted that
Hooke’s correction of his “fancy” (about aether-gravity) had acted as a dare, a challenge, a
stimulus, a diversion—not, however, he insisted, an aid. (Newton, 1989:xiii)
However that may be, Newton now was “hooked”, and henceforth would never
again let the matter of the celestial motions drop entirely from his mind. Shortly
after the resumption of the correspondence with Hooke, between the late autumn of
1680 and the early spring of 1681, a large comet appeared – it even became bright
enough to be visible in broad daylight. Though Newton himself claimed to be an
indifferent observer, apparently because of short sightedness, he made a few of his
own observations, and was also at pains to correspond with Flamsteed about it.
6 W. Sheehan
At first Newton supposed that there were two comets, one going inward toward the
Sun, the other going outward from it. He next observed the comet of 1682 (an appa-
rition of that now known as Halley’s), which was moving retrograde to the sense in
which the planets move. This was a reproof to the vortex theory, for it meant that the
comet would have been beating against the Cartesian tide, did such exist, and
marked the end of Newton’s Cartesian phase. (Westfall, 1993:391–392).
When Halley visited him at Cambridge, Newton had by then been in residence at
Trinity for two decades, as undergraduate, fellow, and—since 1670—as Lucasian
professor of mathematics. The university was then, as now, made up of separate
colleges, each with its own set of turreted buildings and its own history. Trinity,
founded in the last year of the reign of Henry VIII, brought together two older col-
leges, King’s Hall and Michaelhouse, with land and tithes taken from the monks for
support (it was the only college to fly the royal standard, and also the only one to
have a master appointed by the crown). Halley would have entered through the
Great Gate at its entrance, and passed into the square Great Court, with its massive
stone fountain in the centre of the lawn. Newton’s rooms were on the first floor next
to the Great Gate, with windows facing west. He also had his own “elaboratory”,
whose furnaces were often burning “in the spring and fall of the leaf”, and where he
pursued his passion for alchemy; it was situated next to his garden, probably in the
projecting room built between the Great Gate and St. John’s College, with a stair-
case leading down to the garden as shown in David Loggan’s print which shows
Trinity just as it looked when Halley came. (Adrian, 1963).
The French Huguenot mathematician Abraham De Moivre (1667–1754) (a col-
league and friend of the aforementioned Des Maizeaux) gives a vivid, if in some
respects questionable, account of the meeting (Westfall, 1993:403). Halley
asked Newton
what he thought the Curve would be that would be described by the Planets supposing the
force of attraction towards the Sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it. Sr
Isaac replied immediately that it would be an Ellipsis, the Doctor struck with joy & amaze-
ment asked him how he knew it, why saith he I have calculated it, whereupon Dr Halley
asked him for his calculation without any farther delay. Sr Isaac looked among his papers
but could not find it, but he promised him to renew it, & then to send it to him.
Newton claimed he could not find the paper but— still according to De Moivre—in
order to “make good his promise … fell to work again, [to find that he] could not
come to that conclusion which he thought he had before examined with care.
However, he attempted a new way which thou longer than the first, brought him
again to his former conclusion….”
The account glosses over some important details. First, we can give short shrift
to what Newton’s great biographer Richard S. Westfall calls (Westfall, 1993:403)
“the charade of the lost paper”, since it survives among Newton’s papers. Instead of
directly answering Halley’s question, in the terms Halley asked for, Newton wrote a
nine-page first draft of a treatise, De motu in corporum in gyrum (On the Motion of
Bodies in an Orbit). The draft set out five theorems and five problems dealing with
motion in space void of resistance, and then expanded his treatment to cover motion
through a resisting medium. As Whiteside has shown (1970a), Newton does not
actually present a mathematical proof of the proposition that Newton had told
Halley he had demonstrated, but does show the converse: given that the orbit is an
ellipse, the law of force varies according to the inverse-square of the distance.
Moreover, the proof is not easy to follow; probably not even Halley would have
understood it.
Indeed, in this first draft, “there is not a single indication that Newton believes in
universal gravitation, or has deduced any of the consequences of it that differ from
those of the simple assumption of an inverse-square field of force.” (Wilson,
1989:253). Indeed, so far Newton still regards Kepler’s harmonic relationship as
inexact, and is willing to grant wide scope to the Cartesian vortices. Modest though
it is, however, it is rather like premonitory thunder announcing the approaching
storm, for as Curtis Wilson remarks (ibid.), “somehow, in this first tract, Newton has
become ‘embarked’.” After years of seeming indifference, the majestic problem of
the celestial motions has seized him, and seized him irresistibly—it would prove to
be the turning point of Newton’s life, indeed of the whole history of science, and
hand to his successors the crucial tools that would lead to the discovery of Neptune.
Newton produced a second draft of De motu, which is little more than a fair copy
of the first in Halley’s hand, before, in the last months of 1684, probably December
1684 (as tentatively dated by Whiteside [1970a]), sequestered in his rooms at
Trinity, he began a crucial expansion of the nine-page draft of De motu into a trea-
tise in two books ten times as long that became nothing less than a grand investiga-
tion into centripetal forces as they determine orbital motion. (Newton, 1989). This
was to become nothing less than “a systematic demonstration of universal gravita-
tion”. (Westfall, 1980:423). His mind was concentrated now, and instead of being,
as hitherto, confused by the Cartesian fantasies, his definitions become clear and
precise. He defines centripetal force (vs. Huygens’s centrifugal force as “that by
which a body is impelled or attracted toward some point regarded as a centre.”
Resistance: “that which is the property of a regularly impeding medium.” He had
earlier used the term “hypothesis” in stating his propositions; however, he now
introduces the term Lex (law), and proposes what will (in Principia) become the
definitions and three Newtonian laws of motion. With this maneuver, “Newton
effectively embraced the principle of inertia,” says Westfall (1993:167), at which
point “the rest of his dynamics fell quickly into place.”
Indeed, henceforth all reference to ideas about a material aether as the cause of
gravitation are now dropped. Newton now knew, at least as far as the motions of the
Moon and planets were concerned, that the resistance in space was nil, and now—at
last—formulated the idea of an attraction arising from the universal nature of mat-
ter. Now, equipped with some powerful new mathematical tools (Whiteside, 1970b),
he was ready to tackle rigorously the problem of the inverse square law that had
only been suggested in the calculation of the apple and the Moon twenty years
before. (Westfall, 1993:170–171). The turning point in his thinking took place, he
later recalled, at almost the exact moment that the Cambridge Alderman Samuel
Newton (no relation) proclaimed the deceased Charles II’s brother James Stuart, the
Duke of York, King James II of England (February 1685). (Westfall, 1980:423). The
gravitational force Newton had first calculated in a back-of-envelope calculation for
8 W. Sheehan
the Earth and Moon so long ago is now posited to exist between any two bodies, and
to be proportional to their mass, the amount of matter they contain—here we have
one of Newton’s most original concepts–and to become weaker with the increasing
distance between them according to the inverse-square law. He has now liberated
himself from his earlier Cartesian assumptions and sketches for the first time the
powerful conception that would become the soul of the Principia:
If in any position of the planets their common centre of gravity is computed, this either falls
in the body of the Sun or will always be close to it. By reason of the deviation of the Sun
from the centre of gravity, the centripetal force does not always tend to that immobile cen-
tre, and hence the planets neither move exactly in ellipses nor revolve twice in the same
orbit. There are as many orbits of a planet as it has revolutions, as in the motion of the
Moon, and the orbit of any one planet depends on the combined motion of all the planets,
not to mention the action of all these on each other. But to consider simultaneously all these
causes of motion and to define these motions by exact laws admitting of easy calculation
exceeds, if I am not mistaken, the force of any human mind. (Wilson, 1989:253).
What was most extraordinary about his thinking at the time is that he is no longer in
thrall to “matter in motion”. He now sees the “aether”, to which he had long sub-
scribed as a mechanistic cause for gravity, as not only implausible but incompatible
with the actual celestial motions. Instead he embraces “action at a distance”, for
which he would later be heavily criticised by Gottfried W. Leibniz (1646–1716) as
a return to “occult” forces. (Alexander, 1956: p. x). In fact, over the course of his
career he continued to try various explanations in order to beat off Leibniz and oth-
ers, and though he would eventually fib that “the cause of gravity is what I do not
pretend to know” (Newton, 1756:20), his final conclusion—at least according to the
General Scholium of Principia—was that that cause was known, and it was God.
Those controversies need not, however, concern us here. (For anyone wishing to
follow them in detail, see: Ducheyne, 2011:154–159). At present he had enough to
do to work through the mathematical consequences of his idea to worry about final
causes. By April 1685, in fact, Newton was ready to move beyond these preliminary
sketches (which still survive in manuscript) to draft his great work, Philosophiae
naturalis principia mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy),
usually referred to simply as the Principia. He spent the next 18 months in near total
seclusion and almost mystic abstraction from the world. He was, his live-in servant
and sometime amanuensis Humphrey Newton (no relation) (c. 1658–1746), wrote:
So intent, so serious upon his Studies, yt he eat very sparingly, nay, oftimes he has forget to
eat at all so yt going into his Chamber, I have found his Mess untouch’d of wch when I have
reminded him, [he] would reply, Have I; & then making to ye Table, would eat a bit or two
standing…. When he has sometimes taken a Turn or two [in his garden], [he] has made a
sudden stand, turn’d himself about, run up ye Stairs, like another Archimedes, [and] with an
eureka, fallen to write on his Desk standing, without giving himself the Leasure to draw a
Chair to sit down. (Westfall, 1993:406)
Newton’s preliminary manuscripts reveal the titanic nature of his struggles; they are
more like Beethoven’s draft scores than Mozart’s. In the end Newton emerged
largely triumphant. Halley (and Hooke) had opened the door, and Newton had
darted through it. Yet in seeing the immortal work through to publication it must
have required all the tact that still very young man could muster in dealing with
Newton’s “nice” (i.e., touchy) personality. He had now replaced Hooke as full-time
secretary of the Royal Society, and as such was responsible for keeping up the Royal
Society’s voluminous correspondence, taking minutes of its meetings, and editing
its Philosophical Transactions. Moreover, since his father’s death, Halley no longer
enjoyed the fortune he had once depended on. As a secretary he was granted a sal-
ary, which he now needed. Just then, the Royal Society had published Francis
Willoughby’s History of Fishes. In doing so, it had greatly overestimated the
demand, and Halley had to take part of his salary as secretary in remaindered copies.
As the Principia began to work its way through the press, Halley was forced to deal
with Hooke’s claim that Newton had appropriated the inverse-square law—and the
idea of universal gravitation itself—from him. Newton was so enraged that he
threatened for a time to withhold the all-important third book, the System of the
World. The first edition of the Principia—complete with Book III—finally appeared
in July 1687, with Halley paying the expenses of publication out of his own pocket
and furnishing a prefatory poem (in Latin) which, though little less than rapturous,
hardly exaggerates the immensity of Newton’s achievement:
… O mortal men,
Arise! And, casting off your earthly cares,
Learn ye the potency of heaven-born mind,
Its thought and life far from the herd withdrawn!
Nearer the gods no mortal may approach.
(Newton, 1934:xiv–xv)
From the astronomer’s point of view, Newton’s triumphs are so numerous as to be

hard to list, but include his derivations from the inverse square law of the motions of
the planets, his investigation of the shape of the Earth (he found it to be oblate, i.e.,
flattened at the poles) and his qualitative explanation of the precession of the equi-
noxes, the grand phenomena discovered by Hipparchus which Newton showed
arose from the pull of the Moon on the equatorial bulge of the oblate Earth. (The
latter is an explanation so natural that as the 19th century astronomer George Biddell
Airy (1801–1892) later remarked (Grant, 1852:22), this part of the Principia “prob-
ably astonished and delighted and satisfied its readers more than any other.”) Other
problems created greater difficulties. One was the calculation of the motions of
comets. As late as the summer of 1686, Newton admitted to Halley that he had not
yet succeeded—clearly, he was baffled by the horrendous nature of the geometrical
analysis required. He managed, however, to come through in the end, with a work-
able if cumbersome graphical method with which he demonstrated that the orbit of
the comet of 1680 was a parabola. Halley later adapted Newton’s graphical method
to make it amenable to arithmetical calculation and proved the remarkable result
that the comets which had appeared in 1531, 1607, and 1682 were one in the same,
moving in a retrograde orbit around the Sun with a period of 75 years, from which
he famously predicted that the comet which now bears his name would return again
in 1758.
However, by far the most complex problem with which Newton grappled in the
Principia was the theory of perturbations. This involves the notorious three-body
10 W. Sheehan
problem—the way that the disturbing influence of one planet moving round the Sun
affects that of another. In Newton’s time, “the then undeveloped state of the practi-
cal part of astronomy … had not yet attained the precision requisite to make such an
attempt possible” in the case of the planets. (Herschel, 1861 art. 602). In the case of
the Moon it was otherwise, since the disturber of the Moon’s motion around the
Earth is the Sun itself. Indeed, the largest inequalities (irregularities) of the Moon’s
motion had been noted as far back as the time of Hipparchus, 2000 years earlier.
1.3 Newton’s Headache: The Theory of the Moon
Newton understood that, to a first-order approximation, the Moon’s orbit around the
Earth is, of course, an ellipse. This ellipse is, however, perturbed, being alternately
compressed and relaxed by the disturbing effect of the Sun, and forced to turn and
wobble in various complicated ways. The perturbations cause the Moon to some-
times run ahead, at other times behind the position it would have in an undisturbed
elliptical orbit. It was this intricate motion that became the most critical test of the
theory of universal gravitation—and Newton well knew it.
He conceived of the Moon’s path as a Keplerian ellipse drawn from its ideal
curve by the disturbing force of the Sun. Though the effect of this force is always
directed toward the Sun, the Sun’s position relative to the Earth and Moon is ever-
changing. By resolving the force into a radial component (i.e., directed along the
line between the Sun and Moon) and a tangential component (perpendicular to the
line between the Sun and Moon), Newton was able to qualitatively explain all and
quantitatively several of these perturbations at once (Airy, 1884:61ff). However,
Newton found one particular problem, the advance of the line of the apsides, espe-
cially baffling. (Whiteside, 1976). This was a curious and complicated effect,
involving the fluctuation back and forth of the line of the chord, known as the apsi-
des (or apses), joining the perigee and apogee of the Moon’s elliptical orbit around
the Earth. (Perigee is the point at which the Moon approaches nearest to the Earth,
apogee the point at which it is farthest away.) This motion is notoriously irregular—
sometimes it progresses, sometimes it regresses. On the whole the progressive
motion wins out, so that the line of the apsides advances about 3.3° per revolution
of the Moon, and is carried completely around in a period of about nine years. (An
apse is either of two points on an elliptical orbit that are nearest to and farthest from
the focus or centre of attraction.) Hipparchus was aware of the effect; even the
ancient Antikythera Mechanism, apparently based on Hipparchus’s theory of the
Moon, corrected for it. Newton, naturally, tried to account for it on the basis of the
inverse-square law of gravitation. It did not seem to work out.
Newton approached the problem in several ways. The first involved a theorem
(Principia, Book I, proposition 43–45) in which he showed that adding a compo-
nent of an inverse cube force to the inverse square produces a moving line of the
apsides, with no effect on the radial motion. He then used this as an argument for the
inverse-square law, since the lines of the apsides of the planets are essentially
stationary, which would not be the case if the inverse-square were not exact. Turning
then to the advance of the line of the apsides of the Moon, he assumed, correctly,
that it is produced by the disturbing action of the Sun, and attempted to calculate
what the effect on the line of the apsides would be if he subtracted from the attrac-
tion of the Earth on the Moon a force 1/357.45 as great, which is the average value
of the radial component of the Sun’s perturbing force smeared out over one orbit.
His result was an advance in the line of apsides of 1°31′28″ per revolution (see
Principia, Bk I, Prop. 45, Corollary 2, all editions)1. Unfortunately, as he finally
acknowledged only in the 3rd edition (published in 1726, the year before his death)
there was a problem. In his words, “the apse of the Moon is about twice as swift.”
Another method appears in Principia, Book III. In Propositions LXV–LXIX, he
takes the first steps in the study of the motions of three bodies under mutual gravi-
tational attractions, and to Proposition LXVI he presents 22 Corollaries related to
the motion of the Moon. These corollaries Laplace would regard as among the most
remarkable in the Principia. This is true; but this section of the book is also among
the most obscure, so that, as S. Chandrasekhar has said, though
Newton’s astonishing grasp of the entire problem of planetary perturbations and the power
of his insight are clearly apparent, this part of the Principia is also among the most difficult
to grasp because of the paucity of any real explanation and an apparent attempt to conceal
details by recourse, too often, to phrases like “hence it comes to pass”, “by like reasoning”,
and “it is manifest that” at crucial points of the argument. This “secretive style” is nowhere
present, to the same extent, in the Principia. (Chandrasekhar, 1995:258)
The gist of his argument seems to be as follows. Consider the Earth, Moon, and Sun
(T, P, and S), as in the diagram shown here (Fig. 1.3).
The orbit of the Moon is taken to be (to a first approximation) nearly circular.
Also, the fact that the Sun is at an immense distance from both the Earth and Moon
means that the lines SP and ST are parallel. He attempts this calculation (Book I,
Prop XLV, Cor. II), and finds (Cor. XVI) “that the mean motion of the line of the
Fig. 1.3 Diagram from Principia, at Book III, Prop. XV, Problem VI, referred to in text
(Public Domain)
1
Here and in the rest of the book, the symbols °, ′, and ″ refer to the angular measurements used by
astronomers, and mean degrees, minutes, and seconds. There are 60 seconds of arc in 1 minute of
arc, and 60 minutes of arc in 1 degree. There are, of course, 360 degrees in a circle. The moon’s
apparent diameter in the sky is roughly half a degree.
12 W. Sheehan
apsides will be in a given ratio to the mean motion of the nodes; and both those
motions will be directly as the periodical time of the body P, and inversely as the
square of the periodical time of the body P.” (Node: the point at which the orbital
plane of some celestial body, such as the Moon, intersects with the plane of the
ecliptic, the apparent path of the Sun among the stars,) Effectively, Newton is
attempting to derive the relationship between four periods that used since antiquity
to characterise the motions of the Moon:
1. The sidereal year of Earth, To = 365.257 days
2. The sidereal month, T1 = 27.32166 days
3. The anomalistic month or time between successive apogees, T2 = 27.55455 days
4. The draconitic month or nodical month, the time between the Moon’s return to
the same longitude in its orbit, T3 = 27.21222 days.
In terms of the ratio m = T1/To, he discovers the formulae
T2 / T1 − 1 = +3m 2 / 4
and
T3 / T1 − 1 = −3m 2 / 4.
The second formula gives roughly the correct answer for the regression of the
nodes when appropriate values are substituted; however, the first, giving the expres-
sion for the advance of the line of the apsides, yields only half the correct value, as
before. This time, as Newton saw, the calculation fails because it has left out the
effect of the perturbing force at right angles to the radius vector. He therefore tried
another calculation—probably in the winter or early spring of 1687, just as the first
edition of Principia was going to press—that took this into account. It should have
been his tour de force. But he never published the calculation. He did make the
claim, in the first edition of the Principia, that he had computed the motion of the
lunar apsides to be about 40° per year, a value differing only slightly from the
observed value of 38°51′51″ found in Flamsteed’s tables (published in his Doctrine
of the Sphere).(Flamsteed, 1680). He claims, however, that he declined to publish it
since it was “too intricate and burdened with approximations, and moreover insuf-
ficiently accurate.” In the later editions of 1713 and 1726, this scholium is changed,
with all reference to an attempted computation omitted. It would appear that the
great man wanted to erase even the trace of his failure. (We now know, since the
manuscript of the attempted calculation first came to light among the Portsmouth
papers in the 19th century—they were first studied by John Couch Adams
(1819–1892)—that Newton did include both the radial and transverse components
of the Sun’s perturbing force. But he also introduced an unjustified step, so that his
final result—though it appears close to being correct, as Adams saw—is, however,
as later investigators have discovered, “fudged”.) (Fig. 1.4).
In fact, Newton never would succeed in giving a quantitatively correct explana-
tion for the advance of the lunar apsides on the basis of the inverse-square law.
Fig. 1.4 Newton’s

diagram in Principia,
Section IX; the motion of
bodies in movable orbits
and the motion of the
apsides; at Prop. XLIII,
Problem
XXX. (Public Domain)
When he later told his younger contemporary John Machin (1680–1751), professor
of mathematics at Gresham College, London that “his head never ached but with his
study on the Moon” (Machin, 1729:31), he must have been thinking of his struggle
with the advance of the lunar apsides. Even the great Newton was fallible: he left
this particular Everest of the theory of the Moon unscaled, and it would not be con-
quered during his lifetime. Two years after the great man’s death in 1727, Machin
added, “Neither is there any method that I have ever yet met with upon the com-
monly received principles, which is perfectly sufficient to explain the motion of the
Moon’s apogee.”
The other problem that Newton left for future investigators was the perturbations
of the planets on one another. He knew, of course, that they would exist as a conse-
quence of the theory of universal gravitation. To recall again what he had said in de
Motu (Wilson, 1989:253), “There are as many orbits of a planet as it has revolu-
tions … and the orbit of any one planet depends on the combined motion of all the
planets, not to mention the action of all these on each other.” Obviously, to be able
to perform these calculations was of the utmost importance as an extension of the
theory of gravitation and as a means of perfecting predictions of the motions of the
planets. That Newton himself failed to take up the matter was entirely, as Sir John
Herschel (1792–1871) later observed, “owing to the then undeveloped state of the
practical part of astronomy, which had not yet attained the precision requisite to
make such an attempt inviting, or indeed feasible.” (Herschel, 1861, art. 602).
The only mutual planetary perturbations recognised in Newton’s time involved
the “Great Inequality” of the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn, a puzzle which had
already been recognised in the early 17th century and finally unraveled by Pierre
Simon de Laplace (1749–1827) on the basis of perturbation theory in 1784, as
described below. Newton also worried about a problem that would obsess later
astronomers: that of the stability of the Solar System. Deeply religious in his own
14 W. Sheehan
unorthodox way,2 Newton believed that the perturbations among the various bodies
in the Solar System would eventually become sufficiently great as to cause the
whole thing to collapse into disorder unless God intervened to set it back in order
again. (Teeter Dobbs and Jacob, 1985:58). Later astronomers would try to establish
the stability of the Solar System without invoking that “hypothesis”.
1.4 Stars in the Moon’s Way
But let us return to the problem of the advance of the lunar apsides. Newton’s failure
to derive it from the inverse-square law was more than just a bothersome loose end,
since the motion of the apsides plays a singularly significant role in the determina-
tion of the Moon’s place in its orbit. An incorrect determination of the apogee’s
position could lead to an error of as much as 13 or 14° in the place of the Moon
itself—an error twice that encountered by astronomers of ancient times who had
supposed that the Moon moved uniformly in a circle around the Earth.
Though after the publication of the first edition of Principia, which would mark
the greatest achievement of Newton’s life, he seems to have returned to his other
Fig. 1.5 Trinity College, David Loggan’s engraving from Cantabrigia Illustrata, 1688. Newton,
who was in residence at the time the engraving was made, had first-floor rooms with a balcony in
the building joining the Great Gate to the Chapel, facing Trinity Street. His “elaboratory” was in
the corner of his well-tended garden, lying between the building and a buttress of the Chapel.
(Public Domain)
2
Though Newton was affiliated as an undergraduate, fellow and Lucasian professor of mathemat-
ics at Trinity College, he was not a trinitarian at all but a secret Unitarian, and so an advanced
heretic by the standards of the time.
favourite studies, especially alchemy, biblical chronology, and the prophecies of the
Books of Daniel and Revelation. During the 1690s, he seems to have again devoted
more time to alchemy than to all of these put together; in particular, the winter of
1692 seems to have seen a period of the most frantic activity in his “elaboratory”,
and this, which may have involved exposure to heavy metals, has long been sus-
pected to have contributed (though was probably not the only factor) to the mental
breakdown he suffered in 1693 (Fig. 1.5). As he later admitted to his friend John
Locke (1632–1704), whom Newton during his dark period of mental imbalance had
charged with trying to “entangle him with woemen [sic.]”:
The last winter by sleeping too often by my fire I got an ill habit of sleeping & a distemper
wch this summer has been epidemical put me further out of order, so that when I wrote to
you I had not slept an hour a night for a fortnight together & for 5 nights together not a
wink. (Newton to Locke, 15 October 1693; Newton, Correspondence, III:284.)
Whatever the cause (and many have been suggested), Newton, for about a year,
seems to have been, as Christiaan Huygens reported, “not in his right mind”
(Manuel, 1968:222). When he emerged from this crisis, he was not the same
Newton. His creative powers were no longer what they had been–though it was not
true, as Huygens told his brother Constantyn, that Newton was “a man lost and so
to speak dead for research, so I believe, which is deplorable” (ibid). There was cer-
tainly a change, inasmuch as, having for thirty years remained satisfied with the life
of the mind, as a reclusive scholar, he now began—through his friends—to angle for
an important position in society, which meant moving to London. He needed to be
“useful”, and attempted to reconstitute himself as Master of the Mint and president
of the Royal Society. He was still quarrelsome, but a bit more relaxed in company;
he became jowly and pot-bellied, prosperous and vain.
He also continued, off and on, to think about the Moon, but no longer as an object
of detached curiosity. When he thought about it now, it was with a very practical
purpose in mind. The Moon being in some sense a “clock”, it can be used to solve a
very prominent earthly problem: that of finding the longitude of a ship at sea, a
problem with a long pedigree and obviously of the utmost importance to the defence
and prosperity of the great sea-faring British nation, which was just then on the
verge of hurling itself into a global empire. Thus, practical concerns fed the devel-
opment of celestial mechanics, and the solution of the problem of the Moon’s
motion prodded the extensions of Newton’s theory that would be needed for the
calculations related to Neptune.
The determination of one’s position at sea requires knowledge of two coordi-
nates: latitude, one’s position north or south of the equator, and longitude, one’s
east-west position on the globe of the Earth. Latitude can be worked out easily in
principle, although not always in practice on a rolling ship. For instance, already in
the Middle Ages, a Jacob’s staff (also known as a cross staff), consisting of a shaft
fitted with an adjustable cross-bar, was standard for the purpose. The observer rested
one end on his cheek and attempted to sight along the shaft on the Sun or Polaris
while adjusting the length of the length of the bar to find the altitude. (The reader is
advised to try it sometime!) Later, the octant was developed for the purpose.
16 W. Sheehan
By contrast, the longitude of a position on the Earth relative to the reference

framework of the fixed stars is being constantly shuffled by the Earth’s rotation.
Thus, it is a complicated business—so much so that as late as 1711 William Derham
(1657–1735), canon of Windsor and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, in
one of his Boyle lectures claimed that, along with the ability to fly and the problem
of squaring the circle, longitude of sea was insoluble—it lay “beyond the powers of
reasoning that God had given to man.” (Derham, 1713).
Without knowing how to determine longitude at sea, intrepid fifteenth and 16th
century navigators had depended on jealously guarded proprietary knowledge and
maps of sea-routes and dead reckoning. The Portuguese, who pioneered routes
around Africa that enabled them to win a lucrative monopoly on pepper, obsessively
guarded their navigational logs; to divulge them carried the sentence of death. The
Spanish, likewise, kept their maps in a lockbox with two locks, the key to one being
kept by the pilot-major, to the other by the cosmographer-major. Human enterprise
being what it is, in time the secrets leaked out despite the best precautions. Later
trading companies—the British East India Company and the Dutch East India
Company, for instance—acquired their own secret maps showing the best routes.
But if knowledge and maps of these routes were precious, mastery of longitude at
sea would be the pearl of great price, truly—whoever possessed it would gain a
decisive commercial advantage over their colonial rivals. Thus, in 1598, King
Phillip III of Spain—whose empire, enriched beyond the dreams of avarice by the
gold and silver from its New World possessions, was beginning to fade, but was still
the most powerful on Earth—offered a magnificent prize of 6,000 ducats (the equiv-
alent of several million dollars in today’s currency) for the successful solution of the
problem of longitude at sea. (Sheehan and Dobbins:43).
Several schemes were proposed to capture Phillip’s ducats—and later prizes
which were offered in later contests as the problem remained unsolved. Necessarily,
all these methods involved referencing a standard clock—whether an astronomical
one like the Moon or the constantly shifting satellites of Jupiter, or a mechanical
clock able to keep accurate enough time even on a swaying ship bound on a long sea
voyage. The longitude could be found by comparing the local time on the ship with
that at a standard meridian—such as Greenwich or Paris—by comparing the Moon’s
observed position with data worked out in advance for the standard station a clock
set to local time with one keeping Greenwich or Paris time. For each hour’s differ-
ence in time, the longitude difference was 15°. (Sheehan and Dobbins, 2001:14–15).
A number of mathematicians and natural philosophers, including Galileo Galilei
(1564–1642), Christiaan Huygens, and Robert Hooke, devoted much time to the
perfection of pendulum clocks or spring watches, at the end of the 17th century.
Although the pendulum clocks of Huygens were good enough to keep time in an
observatory—they indicated minutes with greater accuracy than the old foliot clocks
could indicate hours, and made possible a new era in precision measures of right
ascensions of stars and planets—they were thrown off by the jostling conditions at
sea. Until John Harrison (1693–1776) devised his famous marine chronometer in
the mid-18th century, no clock could keep time accurately enough at sea to solve the
longitude problem, so much of the effort was directed to what was known as the
“method of lunars”, which depended on knowing the Moon’s place relative to stars
Another random document with
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οὐρανίου
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130.n64.1 τὸ σωτήριον κ[ὰι\αὶ] Replaced.
ζωοποιὸν
130.n64.2 ὥσπερ τι φόβητρον Replaced.
κ[ὰι\αὶ] κακῶν
ἀμυντήριον.
148.n70.1 Εὐσεβεῖς τε κ[ὰι\αὶ] Replaced.
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216.n95.1 πίστει κ[ὰι\αὶ] Replaced.
καλοῖς ἔργοις
φυλαττομένην.
227.15 of her debt to the Added.
wise.[”]
232.n100.1 τίμιον εἵναι κ[ὰι\αὶ] Replaced.
τὴν κόιτην κ[ὰι\αὶ]
αὐτὸν
233.n102.1 κλίμακα κ[ὰι/αὶ] Replaced.
μόνος ἀνάβηθι εἰς
τὸν οὐρανόν
234.n103.1 κ[ὰι/αὶ] σπάνιος αὖ Replaced.
τῆς ἀληθείας φίλος.
274.14 the world- Inserted.
renow[n]ed St.
Sophia
307.12 adding to their Added.
dignity.[”]
313.136.1 θεσμὸυς ἤδη βίου Inserted.
θεῷ [πρ]έποντας
359.33 Christian marty[r]s Inserted.
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Neptune: From Grand Discovery To A World Revealed: Essays On The 200th Anniversary of The Birth of John Couch Adams 1st Edition William Sheehan

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Neptune: From Grand Discovery to a

World Revealed: Essays on the 200th

Primary Mathematics 3A Hoerst

On the Couch A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch

Physics Galaxy 2020 21 Vol 3A Electrostatics Current

Saturn 1st Edition William Sheehan

Olympia The Birth of the Games John A Martino Michael P

The Grand Affair John Singer Sargent in his world Paul

Basics of Virtual Reality From the Discovery of

Essays on Biblical Historiography: From Jeroboam II to

William Sheehan Editor-in-Chief

Series Editors: WAYNE ORCHISTON, University of Southern Queensland,

Editorial Board: JAMES EVANS, University of Puget Sound, USA

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15156

Trudy E. Bell • Carolyn Kennett • Robert W. Smith

Neptune: From Grand

ISSN 2509-310X ISSN 2509-3118 (electronic)

In memory of our colleagues, friends, and

Richard Baum (1930–2016)

Allan Chapman President of the Society for the History of Astronomy

of order. Significantly, these have included not only British accounts—which,

As a characterization of the middle of the nineteenth century, this still seems

In outline, the contents of the book are as follows.

Flagstaff, AZ, USA William Sheehan

1 Preliminaries to the Neptune Discovery: Newtonian

3.3 Adams the Young Astronomer�������������������������������������������������������� 88

7 Clashing Interests: The Cambridge Network and International

10.4 Discovery of Exoplanets Revolutionises

William Sheehan retired after 30 years in practice as

Trudy E. Bell contributing editor for Sky & Telescope

Carolyn Kennett, FRAS is a writer, researcher, and

Robert W. Smith is a professor of history at the

Richard Baum was a leading British historian of

Allan Chapman is a historian of science at Oxford

Clifford J. Cunningham earned his PhD in history of

Davor Krajnović received his PhD in astronomy at

James Lequeux completed his PhD thesis in radio

Brian Sheen, FRAS a retired research chemist, is on

Kenneth Young emeritus professor of physics at the

1.1 The Road to Neptune

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

1.2 The Inverse Square

In August 1684, Edmond Halley (1656–1742), a leading member of London’s

Fig. 1.1 Edmond Halley,

Halley’s trip to Cambridge was a follow on to a meeting that took place in

Fig. 1.2 Isaac Newton, in

From the astronomer’s point of view, Newton’s triumphs are so numerous as to be

1.3 Newton’s Headache: The Theory of the Moon

Fig. 1.4 Newton’s

1.4 Stars in the Moon’s Way

By contrast, the longitude of a position on the Earth relative to the reference

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Flagstaff, AZ, USA William Sheehan

1 Preliminaries to the Neptune Discovery: Newtonian

3.3 Adams the Young Astronomer�� 88

7 Clashing Interests: The Cambridge Network and International

10.4 Discovery of Exoplanets Revolutionises

1.1 The Road to Neptune

1.2 The Inverse Square

1.4 Stars in the Moon’s Way