Overview
- A major reassessment of the discovery of Neptune from a pan-European perspective
- Written by a distinguished team of extensively published researchers
- Provides new analysis and theoretical insights into the original discovery of Neptune
Part of the book series: Historical & Cultural Astronomy (HCA)
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Table of contents (10 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
Written by an international group of authors, this pathbreaking volume explores in unprecedented depth the contentious history of Neptune’s discovery, drawing on newly discovered documents and re-examining the historical record. In so doing, we gain new understanding of the actions of key individuals and sharper insights into the pressures acting on them.
The discovery of Neptune was a captivating mathematical moment and was widely regarded at the time as the greatest triumph of Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. The book therefore begins with Newton’s development of his ideas of gravity. It examines too the mathematical calculations related to the discovery of Neptune, using new theories and tools provided by advances in celestial mechanics over the past twenty years. Through this process, the book analyzes why the mathematical approach that proved so potent in the discovery of Neptune, grand as it was, could not help produce similar discoveries despite several valiant attempts.
In the final chapters, we see how the discovery of Neptune marked the end of one quest—to explain the wayward motions of Uranus—and the beginning of another quest to fill in the map and understand the nature of the outer Solar System, whose icy precincts Neptune, as the outermost of the giant planets, bounds.
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Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Robert W. Smith is a Professor at the University of Alberta in the Department of History and Classics. He directed the Science, Technology and Society Program in the Faculty of Arts. Smith served as the Walter Hines Page Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina in 1993–94. He held the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History at the U.S. National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution during the academic year 2006–07. He is a winner of the History of Science Society's Watson Davis Prize and in 2020 he was awarded the Leroy E. Doggett Prize in Historical Astronomy by the American Astronomical Society. Smith has written numerous groundbreaking articles about the discovery of Neptune.
Trudy E. Bell, contributing editor for Sky & Telescope and member of the editorial board for Springer’s Historical & Cultural Astronomy series of books, earned her M.A. in the history of science and American intellectual history from New York University (1978). Her particular research interest is nineteenth-century US astronomy. The author or coauthor of a dozen books, she has been senior writer for the University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center, and an editor for Scientific American and IEEESpectrum magazines. Her journalism and research awards include the David N. Schramm Award from the American Astronomical Society (2006) and the Herbert C. Pollock Award of the Dudley Observatory (2004 and 2007). Asteroid (323552) is named in her honour.
Carolyn Kennett, FRAS, is a writer, researcher and astronomer who lives in the southwest of England. She is co-editor of the Society for the History of Astronomy Bulletin. She delivers creative engagement opportunities for history, science and astronomy as a director of Mayes Creative Ltd and a director of Cornwall Sea to Stars. She runs her own business Archaeoastronomy Cornwall.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Neptune: From Grand Discovery to a World Revealed
Book Subtitle: Essays on the 200th Anniversary of the Birth of John Couch Adams
Editors: William Sheehan, Trudy E. Bell, Carolyn Kennett, Robert Smith
Series Title: Historical & Cultural Astronomy
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54218-4
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Physics and Astronomy, Physics and Astronomy (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-54217-7Published: 22 May 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-54220-7Published: 23 May 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-54218-4Published: 21 May 2021
Series ISSN: 2509-310X
Series E-ISSN: 2509-3118
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXXI, 403
Number of Illustrations: 59 b/w illustrations, 71 illustrations in colour
Topics: Astronomy, Observations and Techniques, History of Science, History and Philosophical Foundations of Physics, Classical Mechanics, Planetary Sciences