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Article Length : 523 Words

The most remarkable thing about the discovery of Neptune is that even though it is invisible to the naked eye, it was found without a telescope. In fact two men in two different countries both found it within days of each other and neither used a telescope.

The very power of Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion were considered to be their accuracy in detailing every twitch of every planet at every point in their orbit - as the entire mob of planets all went sailing around the sun every twitch was noted. The solar system was a regular, clockwork mob, regular to the inch. And just like Jurassic Park, nothing could go wrong.

In 1846, a Frenchman and an Englishman, Urbain J.J. Leverrier and John Couch Adams, were studying the charts of the observed motions of the planet Uranus. They found something very strange and unexplained, Newton’s laws seemed to fail to work for Uranus. Something was wrong.

Periodically, Uranus drifted away from where the laws of Newton ‘demanded’ she should be found. All other known planets had their gravitational influences already taken into account, so that neither Saturn nor Jupiter could be the cause of this unexpected drift.

The only two possibilities left were that either all the laws of Sir Isaac Newton were fundamentally wrong, or there was a very large planet X, somewhere out beyond the orbit of Uranus, large and able to gravitationally move Uranus away from where she would otherwise be. So it came down to a serious test of Newton’s laws. If the planet wasn’t there... it was egg on Newton’s portrait!

Both men decided that Newton’s laws were most likely reliable, reliable enough to predict an entire planet! Neptune was predicted in 1846, weeks before she was ever seen!

But not only could Leverrier and Adams predict the planet had to be out there, they could do far, far more because of their access to Newton’s truly awesome, regular clockwork laws. They could predict the mass of Neptune, they nailed cold the distance of Neptune from the sun, they knew the position of Neptune in the Earth’s night sky. When they ‘found’ Neptune they found out an enormous amount about her all at once. They even knew how long Neptune’s year would be.

Very impressed by their own calculations and very certain from the way the numbers all ‘fell together neatly’ that the planet plain had to be there, both men confidently and boldly contacted colleagues in two different European observatories. Adams wrote to his friends in Cambridge. Leverrier, knew some astronomers in Berlin and cabled them a simple but insane request.

Cambridge telescopes stayed targeted slightly away from Neptune because of the unreliability of Cambridge’s out of date star charts. There was a real and fleeting opportunity for the more up to date Berliners to prove a foolhardy Frenchman completely mad, and they were not going to miss it.

The Berlin observers found out, however, that Urbain Leverrier was as mad as mother nature! Neptune really was found in England and France, from crunching numbers,

some weeks before she was first seen in Berlin.