Interview with Tom Standage - Author of 'The Neptune File'

The Neptune File

Tom Standage, author of The Neptune File , reveals how two rival planet detectives pioneered a new way of seeing into space, and how the discovery of a missing scrapbook, the ‘Neptune file’, helped in his telling of the discovery of the planet Neptune.

The Neptune File tells the story of how, in the 19th century, the planet Neptune was first located. What was it about the story that particularly interested you?

The Neptune story appealed to me for two reasons: it's really a mystery story, where the solution of the mystery results in the discovery of a new planet, and it's also an episode from the history of science that has strong similarities with current discoveries. I'm something of a collector of such historical parallels. My first book, The Victorian Internet, looked at the similarities between the 19th-century telegraph network and the modern Internet, and my next book, about an 18th-century chess automaton, is linked to the modern debate about machine intelligence and to Garry Kasparov's defeat by a supercomputer.

The Neptune File is a detective story as well as a book about science. How did you piece together the story?

The basis of the mystery, namely the strange behaviour of the planet Uranus, was established scientific fact by the early 19th century. Then all these strange theories started to emerge about what was causing it, and eventually the puzzle was solved by two mathematicians. It was all well documented at the time, particularly since the ensuing controversy, over who should get the credit, generated a lot of press coverage. So I went back to the old scientific journals and newspapers, and the personal correspondence of the participants. I was very lucky because a scrapbook containing many key documents, which had gone missing in the 1960s, reappeared in Chile shortly after I started work on the book. This "Neptune file" belonged to George Airy, the astronomer royal, who is traditionally depicted as the villain in the Neptune story. I'd like to think that because I had better access than any previous writer to the original documents, my portrayal of Airy is more balanced.

How were John Couch Adams' methods different to the ones which astronomers use today?