Abstract
Interestingly enough, it was the French mathematicians, not the British, who adopted Newton’s “Majestic Clockwork” as their own and brought it to a state of near-perfection, but not at first. For a half century after the Principia’s publication, Descartes’s vortex theory (all space is filled with invisible particles of matter whirling in great eddies, or in French, tourbillons) reigned supreme. And yet, as Voltaire wrote, “the French always come late to things, but they do come at last.”1
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Notes and References
Voltaire, Correspondence, April 2, 1764; quoted in Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (New York: Washington Square Press, 1961), p. 246.
A. Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1961; New York: Dover, 1989 reprint), p. 298.
Pannekoek, 299.
Pannekoek, 300.
Quoted in Ivars Peterson, Newton’s Clock: Chaos in the Solar System (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1993), pp. 133–134.
Ibid., 135.
Another second-order effect, independent of the Sun’s motion, is also important. As described by Airy, Gravitation, p. 80: “When the line of apsides is directed toward the Sun, the whole effect of the force is to make it progress, that is, to move in the same direction as the Sun: the Sun passes through about 27° in one revolution of the Moon, and therefore departs only 16° from the line of apsides; and therefore the apsides continues a long time near the Sun. When at right angles to the line joining the Earth and Sun, the whole effect of the force is to make it regress, and therefore, moving in the direction opposite to the Sun’s motion, the angle between the Sun and the line of apsides is increased by 36° in each revolution, and the line of apsides soon escapes from this position. The effect of the former is therefore increased, while that of the latter is diminished.” As in the other case, a small addition to the apogeal over the perigeal effect produces a substantial increase in the effective motion.
Grant, History of Physical Astronomy, 46.
E. Halley, Astronomical Tables with Precepts both in English and Latin (London, 1752).
See Peter Broughton, “The First Predicted Return of Comet Halley,” Journal for the History of Astronomy XVI, 123–133 (1985), and
Curtis Wilson, “Clairaut’s Calculation of the Eighteenth-Century Return of Halley’s Comet,” Journal for the History of Astronomy XXIV, 1–15 (1993).
J. J. le F. de Lalande, Bibliographie astronomique avec l’histoire de l’astronomie depuis 1781 jusqu’à 1802 (Paris, 1803), 677.
Clairaut, Théorie du mouvement des comètes, dans laquelle on a égard aux altérations que leurs orbites éprouvent par l’action des planètes. Avec l’application de cette théorie à la comète qui a été observée dans les années 1531, 1607, 1682, & 1759 (Paris, 1760), 5.
Thomas Carlyle, “Pen Portraits,” in Carlyle: Representative Selections, ed. A. W. Evans (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1913), pp. 363–364.
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© 1997 Richard Baum and William Sheehan
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Baum, R., Sheehan, W. (1997). Triumvirate. In: In Search of Planet Vulcan. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6100-6_4
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