Goodbye to the Aether
Brian Pippard, 20 February 1986
Wranglers and Physicists: Studies in Cambridge Mathematical Physics in the 19th Century
edited by P.M. Harman.
Manchester, 261 pp., £27.50, November 1985,0 7190 1756 4 Show More
edited by P.M. Harman.
Manchester, 261 pp., £27.50, November 1985,
“... of the analyst. It was the small discrepancies between prediction and observation that led Adams and Le Verrier to infer the existence of the so far unobserved Neptune, and to calculate with adequate precision where to point the telescope to find it. In this century Pluto was similarly predicted and discovered, and the methods of the French analysts ... ”