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INTRODUCTION: The Allure of Pure Mathematics in the Victorian Age
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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introduction The Allure of Pure Mathematics in the Victorian Age On September 23, 1846, the Berlin astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle scanned the night sky with a telescope and found what he was looking for— the faint light of the planet Neptune. Excitement about the discovery of an eighth planet quickly spread across Europe and America, generating a wave of effusive front-page headlines. Within scientific circles, however, the enthusiasm rapidly soured into a dispute over who should receive credit. Prior to Galle’s search, a young British mathematician named John Couch Adams and a well-known French mathematician named Urbain Le Verrier each had prognosticated the size and position of the planet. Unsurprisingly, the debate over credit quickly acquired a fierce, nationalistic overtone. Many British astronomers and mathematicians saw the discovery as an important opportunity to achieve recognition of their growing acumen, embodied in Adams. Across the channel, Le Verrier had the gall to suggest that the scienti fic academies name the planet after him, and his Gallic colleagues discounted the role of Adams’s work in the actual search for the planet.1 This divisive argument obscured what was perhaps the more significant aspect of the planetary discovery: Neptune was the first heavenly body found by mathematical prediction. Without peering into the sky at all, Adams and Le Verrier independently calculated the location of the planet through geometrical analysis and the laws of gravitation. Beginning with extremely precise observations of Uranus’s orbital irregularities, each mathematician generated a formula for the planet’s deviations from a proper ellipse. Meshing Newton’s laws with this mathematical description of Uranus’s course, they extrapolated outward to the assumed eighth planet, solving the combined equations for Neptune’s mass, motion, and distance from the Sun. Aside from the initial observations of anomalous gravitational perturba1 tions in the orbit of Uranus, the discovery of Neptune was an exercise in pure thought. This remarkable aspect of the discovery was not lost upon contemporaries . To many other scientists—and many nonscientists as well—the work of Adams and Le Verrier signaled a new era of human knowledge, and they loudly sang its praises. Robert Harry Inglis, the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, told those convening in the theater of Oxford University on June 23, 1847, that the past year “had been distinguished by a discovery the most remarkable, perhaps, ever made as the result of pure intellect exercised before observation, and determining without observation the existence and force of a planet; which existence and which force were subsequently verified by observation.”2 To determine a truth without the use of the common senses was for Inglis and others a mark of greatness. John Herschel, the president of the Royal Astronomical Society, proclaimed that the discovery “surpassed, by intelligible and legitimate means, the wildest pretensions of clairvoyance,”3 and wrote that “the movement of the planet had been felt (on paper, mind) with a certainty hardly inferior to ocular demonstration.”4 He further emphasized the universal character of mathematics: That a truth so remarkable should have been arrived at by methods so different by two geometers, each proceeding in utter ignorance of what the other was doing, is the clearest and most triumphant proof which could have entered into the imagination of man to conceive, of the complete manner in which the Newtonian law of gravitation stands represented in the formulæ of those great mathematicians who have furnished the means by which alone this inquiry could have been entered on; and how perfect a picture—what a daguerreotype—those formulæ exhibit of its effects down to the least minutiæ!5 For Herschel, in other words, Adams and Le Verrier had acted as two independent eyes that in tandem produced a binocular, three-dimensional vision of the distant body of Neptune. No less significant was the fact that the two hailed from different countries and different cultures—a true sign of the genius of mathematics. This transnational characterization of the method behind the planetary discovery thus ran counter to the nationalist debate over proper credit. In France, the physicist and mathematician Jeanequations from god 2 [100.26.1.130] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:50 GMT) Baptiste Biot echoed Herschel’s appeal to the universal aspect of such mathematical analysis: “Minds dedicated to the pursuit of science belong, in my eyes, to a common intellectual nation.”6 Transcendental, unifying truth, Herschel and Biot believed, is available to...