John Couch Adams

Over time, its predicted position was off from where it actually was.

The French mathematician, Urbain Le Verrier, concluded that this was due to an unseen planet, and was able to use the mathematics of orbital mechanics to predict where the new planet would be.

He sent a letter with the predicted position to the Berlin Observatory.

Astronomer Johann Galle read the letter, went right out, and found the planet that very night.

Neptune was within a degree of the predicted spot.

Amazingly, another mathematician, Englishman John Couch Adams, had also worked on the math and had made a similar prediction.

But Le Verrier beat him by two days.

Two days of such tight races are fame-made in science.

Right.

So two mathematicians, John Couch Adams and Urbain Le Verrier, worked independently and basically decided to trust Newton's math completely.

They calculated that an undiscovered planet of a specific mass in a specific location would perfectly account for Uranus's weird behavior.

Yes.

Laplace computed the amount at 10 seconds in one century, agreeing with observation.

Later on, Adams showed that Laplace's calculation was wrong, and that the value he found was too large, so part of the acceleration is now attributed by some astronomers to a lengthening of the day by tidal friction.

Another contribution by Halley to the verification of Newton's law was made when he went to St. Helena to catalogue the southern stars.

He measured the change in length of the second's pendulum in different latitudes, due to the changes in gravity foretold by Newton.

Chapter 9.

Discovery of New Planets.

Herschel, Piazzi, Adams, and Leverrier.

It would be very interesting, but quite impossible in these pages, to discuss all the exquisite researches of the mathematical astronomers, and to inspire a reverence for the names connected with these researches, which for 200 years have been establishing the universality of Newton's law.

in 1846 is one of the great math storytelling triumphs of all time.

Urbain Le Verrier and John Couch Adams, respectively French and British astronomers, one sounds like a Jules Verne hero, the other one sounds like an H.G. Wells hero.

By the way, H.G. Wells was born on the same day, 20 years later.

So all of that is going on.

They're trying to figure out, is there another planet? And they start to do the calculations.

And Le Verrier, as it was described, did the calculation and figured out the location of Neptune by the point of his pen.

It was then sent, as was Couch's findings, to the astronomy department.

Yeah, the astronomy over in Germany where two German astronomers looked up in the sky and realized that what they thought was a star that would occasionally disappear was in fact the planet Neptune.

This deviation from the computed place is not appreciable by the naked eye, yet it was felt by the scientific world to challenge the validity of the Newtonian theory or to foreshadow the addition of still another planet to our solar system.

In July 1841, John Couch Adams, a young undergraduate of St. John's College, Cambridge, whose interest had been aroused by reading Airy's paper on the progress of astronomy, made note of his resolution to attempt, after completing his college course, the solution of the problem then forming in so many minds.

After achieving the BA as Senior Wrangler at the beginning of 1843, Adams undertook to find the most probable orbit and mass of the disturbing body which has acted on Uranus.

The ordinary problem in planetary perturbations calls for the determination of the effect on a known orbit exerted by a body of known mass and motion.