Science from the Enlightenment to the 20th century

Impact of Newtonian theory

Eighteenth-century theoretical astronomy in large measure derived both its point of view and its problems from the Principia. In this work Newton had provided a physics for the Copernican worldview by, among other things, demonstrating the implications of his gravitational theory for a two-body system consisting of the Sun and a planet. While Newton himself had grave reservations as to the wider scope of his theory, the 18th century witnessed various attempts to extend it to the solution of problems involving three gravitating bodies.

Early in the 18th century the English astronomer Edmond Halley, having noted striking similarities in the comets that had been observed in 1531, 1607, and 1682, argued that they were the periodic appearances every 75 years or so of but a single comet that he predicted would return in 1758. Months before its expected return, the French mathematician Alexis Clairaut employed rather tedious and brute-force mathematics to calculate the effects of the gravitational attraction of Jupiter and Saturn on the otherwise elliptical orbit of Halley’s Comet. Clairaut was finally able to predict in the fall of 1758 that Halley’s Comet would reach perihelion in April 1759, with a leeway of one month. Its actual return, in March, was an early confirmation of the scope and power of the Newtonian theory.

It was, however, the three-body problem of either two planets and the Sun or the Sun–Earth–Moon system that provided the most persisting and profound test of Newton’s theory. This problem, involving more regular members of the solar system (i.e., those describing nearly circular orbits having the same sense of revolution and in nearly the same plane), permitted certain simplifying assumptions and thereby invited more general and elegant mathematical approaches than the comet problem. An illustrious group of 18th-century continental mathematicians (including Clairaut; the Bernoulli family and Leonhard Euler of Switzerland; and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, and Pierre-Simon Laplace, of France) attacked these astronomical problems, as well as related ones in Newtonian mechanics, by developing and applying the calculus of variations as it had been formulated by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It is a lovely irony that this continental exploitation of Leibniz’s mathematics—which was itself closely akin to Newton’s version of calculus, which he called fluxions—was fundamental for the deepening establishment of the Newtonian theory to which Leibniz had objected because it reintroduced, according to Leibniz, occult forces into physics.

In order to attack the lunar theory, which also commanded attention as the most likely astronomical approach to the navigational problem of determining longitude at sea, Clairaut was forced to adopt methods of approximation, having derived general equations that neither he nor anyone else could integrate. Even so, Clairaut was unable to calculate from gravitational theory a value for the progression of the lunar apogee greater than 50 percent of the observed value; therefore, he supposed in 1747 (with Euler) that Newton’s inverse-square law was but the first term of a series and, hence, an approximation not valid for distances as small as that between Earth and the Moon. This attempted refinement of Newtonian theory proved to be fruitless, however, and two years later Clairaut was able to obtain, by more detailed and elaborate calculations, the observed value from the simple inverse-square relation.

Certain of the three-body problems, most notably that of the secular acceleration of the Moon, defied early attempts at solution but finally yielded to the increasing power of the calculus of variations in the service of Newtonian theory. Thus, it was that Laplace—in his five-volume Traité de mécanique céleste (1798–1827; Celestial Mechanics)—was able to comprehend the whole solar system as a dynamically stable, Newtonian gravitational system. The secular acceleration of the Moon reappeared as a theoretical problem in the middle of the 19th century, persisting into the 20th century and ultimately requiring that the effects of the tides be recognized in its solution.

Newtonian theory was also employed in much more dramatic discoveries that captivated the imagination of a broad and varied audience. Within 40 years of the discovery of Uranus in 1781 by the German-born British astronomer William Herschel, it was recognized that the planet’s motion was somewhat anomalous. In the next 20 years the gravitational attraction of an unobserved planet was suspected to be the cause of Uranus’s persisting deviations. In 1845 Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier of France and John Couch Adams of England independently calculated the position of this unseen body; the visual discovery (at the Berlin Observatory in 1846) of Neptune in just the position predicted constituted an immediately engaging and widely understood confirmation of Newtonian theory. In 1915 the American astronomer Percival Lowell published his prediction of yet another outer planet to account for further perturbations of Uranus not caused by Neptune. Although Pluto was discovered by sophisticated photographic techniques in 1930, it was still too small to explain the perturbations, which turned out to be caused by inaccurate measurements of Neptune’s mass.

In the second half of the 19th century, the innermost region of the solar system also received attention. In 1859 Le Verrier calculated the specifications of an intra-mercurial planet to account for a residual advance in the perihelion of Mercury’s orbit (38 seconds of arc per century), an effect that was not gravitationally explicable in terms of known bodies. While a number of sightings of this predicted planet were reported between 1859 and 1878—the first of these resulting in Le Verrier’s naming the new planet Vulcan—they were not confirmed by observations made either during subsequent solar eclipses or at the times of predicted transits of Vulcan across the Sun.

The theoretical comprehension of Mercury’s residual motion involved the first successful departure from Newtonian gravitational theory. This came in the form of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which accounted for the residual effect, which by 1915 was calculated to be 43 seconds. This achievement, combined with the 1919 observation of the bending of a ray of light passing near a massive body (another consequence of general relativity theory), constitutes the main experimental verification of that theory.