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The Neptune File
By Tom Standage
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Penguin | ISBN 0140294643 | £6.99
| 140 Pages| Published Jul 05 2001
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?
Adams was the first of the two mathematicians
to determine the position of the planet Neptune, whose mass was
gravitationally deflecting Uranus from its predicted course through
the skies. Neptune was, in other words, found indirectly, as a result
of its gravitational influence on another body. And that's how planets
are being detected around other stars today: from the wobbles they
cause in the stars' motions. So there's a direct link between the
two. The Neptune discovery was a prototype of the modern discoveries,
the first of which was made in 1995.
In the book you describe how the
scientific establishment in England didn't offer Adams much support
in his research. Do you think much has changed in the last 150 years?
It's tempting to put Adams down as
one of those unlucky Britons who have a brilliant idea and are then
ignored by the establishment. There are plenty of examples in the
history of science and technology of ideas that are dreamed up in
Britain only to be exploited elsewhere. But I think Adams was just
unlucky. He was a very modest chap, not at all pushy, which meant
he found it hard to convince Airy about his new-planet theory, particularly
since it was an idea Airy had already rejected.
Are today's planet-hunters mavericks
like their earlier counterparts?
They used to be. In the early 1990s,
planet hunting was regarded as a very dubious field, and those working
in it were regarded with disdain by other astronomers. It was like
saying you were working on perpetual motion, or trying to make contact
with aliens. Planet hunters had to say that they were researching
"sub-stellar" companions to other stars, or that they
were interested in brown dwarfs, in order to disguise what they
were doing. But since the discovery of the first planets orbiting
other stars, things have changed a great deal, and it's now one
of the sexiest fields in modern science.
Last year in The Economist you reported
that planet-hunters had located 12 new planets. Are we likely to
start getting blasé about these new discoveries?
We are already. Eleven more planets
were announced in April this year, bringing the total to over 60,
and it hardly generated any press coverage. In a sense, this is
understandable; it's hard to get excited about something you can't
see. If you're told it's there, but just hasn't been seen yet, you
shrug, like people did when Adams claimed to have found Neptune.
But when we get the first image of an extrasolar planet, sometime
in the next decade, that will be front-page news. And the first
picture of an Earth-like planet will probably become an iconic image.
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