hear of the "triumphal discovery of Neptune"—this "monumental achievement of theoretical astronomy," as the text books call it.
The whole trouble is that we've looked it up.
The text-books omit this:
That, instead of the orbit of Neptune agreeing with the calculations of Adams and Leverrier, it was so different—that Leverrier said that it was not the planet of his calculations.
Later it was thought best to say no more upon that subject.
The text-books omit this:
That, in 1846, every one who knew a sine from a cosine was out sining and cosining for a planet beyond Uranus.
Two of them guessed right.
To some minds, even after Leverrier's own rejection of Neptune, the word "guessed" may be objectionable—but, according to Prof. Peirce, of Harvard, the calculations of Adams and Leverrier would have applied quite as well to positions many degrees from the position of Neptune.
Or for Prof. Peirce's demonstration that the discovery of Neptune was only a "happy accident," see Proc. Amer. Acad. Sciences, 1-65.
For references, see Lowell's Evolution of Worlds.
Or comets: another nebulous resistance to our own notions. As to eclipses, I have notes upon several of them that did not occur upon scheduled time, though with differences only of seconds—and one delightful lost soul, deep-buried, but buried in the ultra-respectable records of the Royal Astronomical Society, upon an eclipse that did not occur at all. That delightful, ultra-sponsored thing of perdition is too good and malicious to be dismissed with passing notice: we'll have him later.
Throughout the history of astronomy, every comet that has come back upon predicted time—not that, essentially, there was anything more abstruse about it than is a prediction that you can make of a postman's periodicities to-morrow—was advertised for all it was worth. It's the way reputations are worked up for fortune-tellers by the faithful. The comets that didn't come back—omitted or explained. Or Encke's comet. It came back slower and slower. But the astronomers explained. Be almost absolutely sure of that: they explained. They had it all worked out and formulated and "proved" why that comet was coming back slower and slower—and there the dam thing began coming faster and faster.
Halley's comet.
