The Philosophical Breakfast Club (51 page)

Whewell was annoyed with Herschel for upsetting the fine balance of international cooperation in science he had brought to bear so masterfully in his tide project. Although he, too, was “vexed” that the discovery was not made at Cambridge, he could not agree with some of Herschel’s published remarks. “I hope you will pardon me,” he wrote him, “if I say that your statement if correctly reported in the Cambridge paper that the discovery of the new Planet was due to Adams’s researches—appears to me too strong for the occasion.” Until the planet was actually observed, Whewell reminded Herschel, the theory that there existed a planet was only a “physical hypothesis,” which still needed to be tested; it was not confirmed until Galle saw it with his own eyes.
²⁰
And it was because of Le Verrier, not Adams, that Galle looked.

Thanks to Whewell’s admonishment, Herschel—who generally disliked conflict—found a way to give both Adams and Le Verrier credit. In a letter to Jones, Herschel bemoaned a recent article in the
Mechanics Magazine
that had accused Le Verrier of stealing Adams’s results (an article that was undoubtedly influenced by Herschel’s own earlier comments on the affair). “It is a shame to make rivals and competitors of two men who ought to be sworn brothers,” Herschel huffed to Jones. “Adams has the acknowledged priority in point of time that nothing
can
shake but till the Planet was found it was only a physical hypothesis upon trial, and no one can truly deny also that Leverrier
shot fair
, and
brought down the bird
. Now my view is that there is quite bird enough for both!”
²¹
Adams had been the first to solve the problem and make a prediction, but Le Verrier was the one who put into motion the events leading to the discovery of the new planet.

The crucial thing, Herschel continued to believe, was that Adams and Le Verrier had each come to the same result by his own calculations. Just as two independent computers were used to help ensure accuracy in de Prony’s great table-making project, here too the correctness of the result was confirmed by the congruence of the two separate sets of calculations. As Herschel wrote to Le Verrier, “I cannot help considering it as fortunate for science that this should have happened. All idea of a lucky guess—a mutual destruction of conflicting errors—of a right result got at by wrong means is precluded.”
²²

Herschel hoped that the public would be convinced that scientific discovery is not just a matter of guesswork or accidental stumbling onto the truth. Seven years earlier, in his
Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences
, Whewell had also tried to convince his readers that scientific breakthroughs are not made purely by accident. But he did not convince everyone. David Brewster, for one, had argued in his review of Whewell’s book that most scientific advances—such as the telescope, the microscope, and galvanism—were “discoveries in which accident had the principal share.”
²³
Some people were starting to claim that the discovery of Neptune had not at all been a triumph of science, but rather merely a matter of pure chance, because the actual planet’s orbit radius, eccentricities, and apse positions diverged somewhat from those predicted by Le Verrier and Adams. The American astronomer Benjamin Peirce was calling the discovery a “happy accident.”
²⁴
Soon the Paris Archive librarian, Jacques Babinet, was suggesting that Neptune was not even the planet
predicted by Le Verrier, but a different one that just happened to be caught by Galle’s telescope; he urged the Paris Observatory to resume the search for Le Verrier’s still-undiscovered planet. Le Verrier himself had begun to doubt the merits of his discovery. Herschel had to convince him that he had nothing to worry about: that the concordance of the two results, by Adams and himself, was the best evidence that the planet had not been discovered by accident (and that the planet discovered was the one predicted by the two astronomers).
²⁵

Trying to smooth over the discord he had helped to create, Herschel plotted a way to bring the two men together in a show of brotherly cooperation. Herschel finally had his chance when he learned that both Adams and Le Verrier would be attending the meeting of the British Association in Oxford at the end of June. He invited the two men to visit Collingwood when the meeting ended. The two astronomical soothsayers, along with several other men of science, assembled at Collingwood on the tenth of July. Although Le Verrier and Adams could not speak directly to each other, they reportedly got on well, with the help of Herschel’s translating skills and, perhaps also, his excellent claret.

Airy refused Herschel’s invitation to attend this meeting. He was still smarting over the barrage of criticism he had faced after it became known that he had sat on Adams’s calculations for a full year without doing anything. Things got so bad that Airy felt compelled to write an exculpatory paper, “Account of some circumstances historically connected with the discovery of the planet external to Uranus,” which he delivered at the Royal Astronomical Society in November 1846. But the crowd was not convinced that Airy had done what he could to ensure that the British secured the prize of a new planet. The rancor directed at Airy lasted even after his death, nearly half a century later. Airy’s friends suggested a commemoration of his life at Westminster Abbey, but the old anger toward him because of Neptune rose up and prevented it.
²⁶
When Adams died—only a few weeks after Airy—his obituary in the
Times
complained that Adams was “deprived of the full glory” of the discovery because of the “doubts and procrastinations” of the Astronomer Royal.
²⁷
Sedgwick, blaming both Airy and Challis for their inaction, was once heard to explode in the Trinity Combination Room, “O curse their narcotic souls!”
²⁸

Quietly, some wondered if Adams himself deserved a share of the blame. Why did he not publish his results, or at least answer Airy’s query about the radius vector? In a letter from Adams to Airy on September 2,
1846, the last day of the British Association meeting in Southampton, Adams claimed that he had prepared a paper to present at the Mathematical and Physical Sciences section, but had arrived too late.
²⁹
Was he planning to reveal his calculations? Why was he unable to arrive on time? Galle was not sent the coordinates until nearly three weeks later; there was still time for British astronomers to go back to their home telescopes after the meeting and try to find the planet first.

The members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, and some of their friends, blamed the loss of the discovery on a broader societal problem—not just on Airy or Challis or Adams, but rather on negative attitudes toward science in England, which still persisted nearly thirty years since they began their work to transform science. In a letter to the
Guardian
right after the planet was observed, Herschel proclaimed that he could not think of anything “better calculated to impress the general mind with a respect for the mass of accumulated facts, laws and methods, as they exist at present, and the reality and efficiency of the forms into which they have been molded than such a circumstance. We need some reminder of this kind in England, where a want of faith in the higher theories is still to a certain degree our besetting weakness.”
³⁰

Much had changed for the better since their labors commenced, yet there was still work remaining. It was beginning to be possible to pursue a career in science. Airy, in fact, was the first Astronomer Royal dependent solely on the salary for that position; earlier Astronomers Royal were in holy orders (and thus were partially supported by ecclesiastical revenues) or had other means of support (Halley had a navy pension and private money).
³¹
But not many such opportunities existed. Less than a year after the discovery of Neptune, Richard Sheepshanks told a correspondent that “I think there is a hope that Mr. Adams will continue in his astronomical researches.… in England there is no
carrièr
for men of science. The Law or the Church seizes on all talent which is not independently rich or careless about its wealth.”
³²
Adams did persist in his research, but he had to subsist on a college fellowship until 1859, when he was named the Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry at Cambridge.

There were now greater opportunities for official recognition of scientific excellence. Queen Victoria offered a knighthood to Adams when she met him during a visit to Cambridge in July of 1847, but Adams declined for practical reasons, noting that it would restrict his choice of career (it would be unseemly for “Sir John” to be coaching students at Cambridge,
for example) and his choice of wife (who would have to be of a higher social standing than the wife of a Cambridge don). It was difficult to be a knight without an income that could support the upturn in social rank. There were now a number of venues in which to announce scientific results, such as the British Association, the Astronomical Society, and the Cambridge Philosophical Society, but Adams, for whatever reason, had not availed himself of these.

By this time there was a thriving mass market for lectures, periodicals, and popular books on science, even books that discussed scientific method—such as those by Babbage, Herschel, Jones, and Whewell. But the interest of the general educated public was often confined to the more accessible experimental or observational sciences. Crowds flocked to demonstrations with electrical batteries, optical illusions, chemistry sets, demonstrations that entertained as well as educated. And they attended lectures describing telescopic, meteorological, and geological observations that they could re-create themselves, with their home-based telescopes, their thermometers and barometers, and their geological hammers. It was more difficult to inspire interest in the “higher theories” of science, as Herschel put it—and by this he meant specifically the more abstract, mathematical parts of the physical sciences.

Augustus De Morgan agreed with Herschel; he believed that the reason the British lost the chance to make the discovery was “simply because there is not sufficient faith in Mathematics” in the nation.
³³
No one had believed that mathematical calculations were enough to justify the time and effort of looking for a predicted planet. Challis himself had admitted that he had been deterred from seeking the planet when he first received Adams’s calculations because it was “so novel a thing to undertake observations in reliance upon merely theoretical deductions.
³⁴
In part this is because the calculations were so advanced that even Airy—who had been senior wrangler in his day—could not easily follow them.

Thanks to Babbage, Herschel, Whewell, and the rest of the Analytical Society, mathematical training at Cambridge had quickly caught up with the best French mathematicians, stressing the most advanced analytical methods. This change had not been fully implemented until the mid-1820s; until that point it was not necessary to know the new analytical mathematics in order to succeed on the mathematical Tripos. Airy had been senior wrangler in 1823, just before the change occurred. By the mid-1840s, William Thomson could criticize Airy for making
mathematical errors that would be “repulsive to a second or third year [Cambridge] man.”
³⁵
Airy’s difficulty in grasping Adams’s calculations was compounded by the fact that Adams was a particularly brilliant mathematician; it was said that on his Tripos, while most of the students scribbled frantically to solve the problems—even Whewell had done so—Adams sat quietly and worked out the problems “in his head” before even putting pen to paper.
³⁶
If Airy could not understand his calculations, the general public, of course, would be much less likely to comprehend and appreciate them, or other highly mathematical scientific theories. By bringing the most precise mathematical methods into science, the Philosophical Breakfast Club had made scientific research both more modern and less accessible to the public. They had given scientists a new and powerful tool—but it was not one that could be wielded by the interested amateur. Even in France there was enough resistance to such highly mathematical work that the Paris Observatory refused to take up the search for the new planet, and Le Verrier was forced to send his results to a young German astronomer who was willing to devote some time at the telescope to please his scientific hero.

Babbage agreed that mistrust of mathematical science was to blame for the British losing out on the discovery. The same mistrust had led many—notably Airy—to disparage the idea of building an analytical calculating engine. If only his engine were built, much of the wariness about mathematical science would dissipate, Babbage believed. Babbage wrote to Adams, commiserating with him. “I … cannot … help but suspecting that if you had felt the confidence in your
arithmetical
results which the fact has proved they deserved even the most discouraging circumstances would not have prevented you from publishing the results of a theory of which you entertained no doubt.” With Babbage’s engine, making the calculations would have been transformed into a straightforward matter, removing all source of error, and convincing others easily of the accuracy of the conclusions.
³⁷
Adams was inclined to agree. “It would be difficult,” he sighed, “to overestimate the value of such a machine.”
³⁸

B
ABBAGE’S MIND
was on his calculating machines, for he had suddenly—and literally—gone back to the drawing board. After four years of only sporadic work on the Analytical Engine, Babbage abruptly turned his attention back to the Difference Engine. Working from October 1846
until March 1849, he designed a brand-new engine, the Difference Engine Number 2. Like the original Difference Engine, this one used the method of finite differences to calculate functions. But Babbage applied to his plan for this machine some of the new techniques he had developed for the Analytical Engine, and so it would require fewer parts and calculate more quickly. (And unlike the original Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, this one was actually built—though not until 1991, when the Science Museum in London constructed a working Difference Engine Number 2 from Babbage’s plans, using the engineering tolerances possible in Babbage’s time. It is a beautiful piece of machinery and calculates correctly, its gear wheels smoothly turning with a satisfying whirring sound.)