or seeming existence of exactness and realness, somewhere—
Except—that, if there be nearby lands in the sky and beings from foreign worlds that visit this earth, that is a great subject, and the trash that is clogging an epoch must be cleared away.
We have had a little sermon upon the insecurity of human triumphs, and, having brought it to a climax, now seems to be the time to stop; but there is still an involved “triumph” and I’d not like to have inefficiency, as well as probably everything else, charged against us—
The Discovery of Uranus.
We mention this stimulus to the text book writers’ ecstasies, because out of phenomena of the planet Uranus, the “Neptune-triumph” developed. For Richard Proctor’s reasons for arguing that this discovery was not accidental, see Old and New Astronomy, p. 646. Philosophical Transactions, 71-492—a paper by Herschel—“An account of a comet discovered on March 13, 1781.” A year went by, and not an astronomer in the world knew a new planet when he saw one: then Lexell did find out that the supposed comet was a planet.
Statues from which used to drip the life-blood of a parasitic cult—
Structures of parabolas from which bleed equations—
As we go along we shall develop the acceptance that astronomers might as well try to squeeze blood from images as to try to seduce symbols into conclusions, because applicable mathematics has no more to do with planetary inter-actions than have statues of saints. If this denial that the calculi have place in gravitational astronomy be accepted, the astronomers lose their supposed god; they become an unfocussed priesthood; the stamina of their arrogance wilts. We begin with the next to the simplest problem in celestial mechanics: that is the formulation of the inter-actions of the sun and the moon and this earth. In the highest of mathematics, final, sacred mathematics, can this next to the simplest problem in so-called mathematical astronomy be solved?
It can not be solved.
Every now and then, somebody announces that he has solved the Problem of the Three Bodies, but it is always an incomplete,
