Astronomy: The Science of the Heavenly Bodies Part 4

Nor could anyone else in that day answer these questions: (1) The planets move in orbits that are elliptical not circular--why should they move in an imperfect curve, rather than the perfect one in which it had always been taught that they moved? (2) Why should our planet vary its velocity at all, and travel now fast, now slow; especially why should the speed so vary that the line of varying length, joining the planet to the sun, always pa.s.ses over areas proportional to the time of describing them? And (3) Why should there be any definite relation of the distances of planets from the sun to their times of revolution about him? Why should it be exactly as the cube of one to the square of the other?

We must remember that the Copernican system itself was not yet, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, accepted universally; and the great minds of that period were most concerned in overturning the erroneous theory of Ptolemy.

The next step in logical order was to find a basic explanation of the planetary motions, and Descartes and his theory of vortices are worthy of mention, among many unsuccessful attempts in this direction.

Descartes was a brilliant French philosopher and mathematician, but his hypothesis of a mult.i.tude of whirlpools in the ether, while ingenious in theory, was too vague and indefinite to account for the planetary motions with any approach to the precision with which the laws of Kepler represented them.

Another great astronomer whose labors helped immensely in preparing the way for the signal discoveries that were soon to come was Huygens, a man of versatility as natural philosopher, mechanician, and astronomical observer. Huygens was born thirteen years before the death of Galileo, and to the discovery of the laws of motion by the latter Huygens added researches on the laws of action of centrifugal forces. Neither of them, however, appeared to see the immediate bearing on the great general problem of celestial motions in its true light, and it was reserved for another generation, and an astronomer of another country, to make the one fundamental discovery that should explain the whole by a single simple law.

CHAPTER XIII

NEWTON AND MOTION

"How is it that you are able to make these great discoveries?" was once asked of Sir Isaac Newton, _facile princeps_ of all philosophers, and the discoverer of the great law of universal gravitation.

"By perpetually thinking about them," was Newton's terse and illuminating reply. He had set for himself the definite problem of Kepler's laws: why is it that they are true, and is there not some single, general law that will embody all the circ.u.mstances of the planetary motions?

Newton was born in 1643, the year after the death of Galileo. He had a thorough training in the mathematics of his day, and addressed himself first to an investigation and definite formulation of the general laws of motion, which he found to be three in number, and which he was able to put in very simple terms. The first one is: Any body, once it is set in motion, will continue to move forward in a straight line with a uniform velocity forever, provided it is acted upon by no force whatever. In other words, a state of motion is as natural as a state of rest (rest in relation to things everywhere adjacent) in which we find all things in general.

Here on earth where gravity itself pulls all objects downward toward the earth, and where resistance of the air tends to hold a moving body back and bring it to rest, and where friction from contact with whatever material substance may be in its path is perpetually tending to neutralize all motion--with all three of these forces always at work to stop a moving body, the truth of this first and fundamental law of motion was not apparent on the surface.

Till Galileo's time everyone had made the mistake of supposing that some force or other must be acting continually on every moving body to keep it in motion. Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Leonardo da Vinci--all failed to see the truth of this law which Newton developed in the immortal _Principia_. And at the present day it is not always easy to accept at first, although the progress of mechanical science, by reducing friction and resistance, has produced machines in which motion of large ma.s.ses may be kept up indefinitely with the application of only the merest minimum of force.

Once a planet is set in motion round the sun, it would go on forever through frictionless, non-resistant s.p.a.ce; but there must be a central force, as Huygens saw clearly, to hold it in its...o...b..t. Otherwise it would at any moment take the direction of a tangent to the orbit. Here is where Newton's second law of motion comes in, and he formulated it with great definiteness. When any force acts on a moving body, its deviation from a straight line will be in the direction of the force applied and proportional to that force.

In accord with this law, Newton first began to inquire whether the force of attraction here on earth, which everyone commonly recognizes as gravity, drawing all things down toward the center of the earth, might not extend upward indefinitely. It is found in operation on the summits of mountain peaks, and the clouds above them and the rain falling from them are obviously drawn downward by the same force. May it not extend outward into s.p.a.ce, even as far as the moon?

This was an audacious question, but Newton not only asked, but tried to answer it in the year 1665, when he was only twenty-three. On the surface of the earth this attraction is strong enough to draw a falling body downward through a vertical s.p.a.ce of sixteen feet in a second of time. What ought it to be at the distance of the moon. The distance of the moon in Newton's time was better known in terms of the earth's size than was the size of the earth itself: the earth's radius was known to be one-sixtieth of the moon's distance, but the earth's diameter was thought to be something under 7,000 miles, so that Newton's first calculations were most disappointing, and he laid them aside for nearly twenty years.

Meanwhile the French astronomers led by Picard had measured the earth anew, and showed it to be nearly 8,000 miles in diameter. As soon as Newton learned of this, he revised his calculations, and found that by the law of the inverse square the moon, in one second, should fall away from a tangent to its...o...b..t one thirty-six hundredth of sixteen feet.

This accorded exactly with his original supposition that the earth's attraction extended to the moon. So he concluded that the force which makes a stone fall, or an apple, as the story goes, is the same force that holds the moon in its...o...b..t, and that this force diminishes in the exact proportion that the square of the distance from the earth's center increases. The moon, indeed, becomes a falling body; only, as Kingdon Clifford puts it: "She is going so fast and is so far off that she falls quite around to the other side of the earth, instead of hitting it; and so goes on forever."

[Ill.u.s.tration: NICHOLAS COPERNICUS]

[Ill.u.s.tration: GALILEO GALILEI]

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHANN KEPLER]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SIR ISAAC NEWTON]

Newton goes on in the _Principia_ to explain the extension of gravitation to the other bodies of the solar system beyond the earth and moon. Clearly the same gravitation that holds the moon in its...o...b..t round the earth, must extend outward from the sun also, and hold all the planets in their orbits centered about him. Newton demonstrates by calculation based on Kepler's third law that (1) the forces drawing the planets toward the sun are inversely as the squares of their mean distances from him; and (2) if the force be constantly directed toward the sun, the radius vector in an elliptic orbit must pa.s.s over equal areas in equal times.

CHAPTER XIV

NEWTON AND GRAVITATION

So all of Kepler's laws could be embodied in a single law of gravitation toward a central body, whose force of attraction decreases outward in exact proportion as the square of the distance increases.

Only one farther step had to be taken, and this the most complicated of all: he must make all the bodies of the sky conform to his third law of motion. This is: Action and reaction are equal, or the mutual actions of any two bodies are always equal and oppositely directed. There must be mutual attractions everywhere: earth for sun as well as sun for earth, moon for sun and sun for moon, earth for Venus and Venus for earth, Jupiter for Saturn and Saturn for Jupiter, and so on.

The motions of the planets in the undisturbed ellipses of Kepler must be impossible. As observations of the planets became more accurate, it was found that they really did fail to move in exact accord with Kepler's laws unmodified. Newton was unable, with the imperfect processes of the mathematics of his day to ascertain whether the deviations then known could be accounted for by his law of gravitation; but he nevertheless formulated the law with entire precision, as follows:

Every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle with a force exactly proportioned to the product of their ma.s.ses, and inversely as the square of the distance between their centers.

The centuries of astronomical research since Newton's day, however, have verified the great law with the utmost exactness. Practically every irregularity of lunar and planetary motion is accounted for; indeed, the intricacies of the problems involved, and the nicety of their solution, have led to the invention of new mathematical processes adequate to the difficulties encountered.

And about the middle of the last century, when Ura.n.u.s departed from the path laid out for it by the mathematical astronomers, its...o...b..tal deviations were made the basis of an investigation which soon led to the a.s.signment of the position where a great planet could be found that would account for the unexplained irregularities of the motion of Ura.n.u.s. And the immediate discovery of this planet, Neptune, became the most striking verification of the Newtonian law that the solar system could possibly afford.

The astronomers of still later days investigating the statelier motions of stellar systems find the Newtonian law regnant everywhere among the stars where our most powerful telescopes have as yet reached. So that Newton's law is known as the law of Universal Gravitation, and its author is everywhere held as the greatest scientist of the ages.

Newton's _Principia_ may be regarded as the culminating research of the inductive method, and further outline of its contents is desirable. It is divided into three books following certain introductory sections. The first book treats of the problems of moving bodies, the solutions being worked out generally and not with special reference to astronomy. The second book deals with the motion of bodies through resistant media, as fluids, and has very little significance in astronomy. The third book is the all important one, and applies his general principles to the case of the actual solar system, providing a full explanation of the motions of all the bodies of the system known in his day. Anyone who critically reads the _Principia_ of Newton will be forced to conclude that its author was a genius in the highest sense of the word. The elegance and thoroughness of the demonstrations, and the completeness of application of the law of gravitation are especially impressive.

The universality of his new law was the feature to which he gave particular attention. It was clear to him that the gravitation of a planet, although it acted as if wholly concentrated at the center, was nevertheless resident in every one of the particles of which the planet is composed. Indeed, his universal law was so formulated as to make every particle attract every other particle; and an investigation known as the Cavendish experiment--a research of great delicacy of manipulation--not only proves this, but leads also to a measurement of the earth's mean density, from which we can calculate approximately how much the earth actually weighs.

Another way to attack the same problem is by measuring the attraction of mountains, as Maskelyne, Astronomer Royal of Scotland did on Mount Schehallien in Scotland, which was selected because of its sheer isolation. The attraction of the mountain deflected the plumb-lines by measurable amounts, the volume of the mountain was carefully ascertained by surveys, and geologists found out what rocks composed it.

So the weight of the entire mountain became pretty well known, and combining this with the observed deflection, an independent value of the earth's weight was found.

Still other methods have been applied to this question, and as an average it is found that the materials composing the earth are about five and a half times as heavy as water, and the total weight of the earth is something like six s.e.xtillions of tons.

What is the true shape of the earth? And does the earth's turning round on its axis affect this shape? Newton saw the answer to these questions in his law of gravitation. A spherical figure followed as a matter of course from the mutual attraction of all materials composing the earth, providing it was at rest, or did not turn round on its axis. But rotation bulges it at the equator and draws it in at the poles, by an amount which calculation shows to be in exact agreement with the amount ascertained by actual measurement of the earth itself.

Another curious effect, not at first apparent, was that all bodies carried from high lat.i.tudes toward the equator would get lighter and lighter, in consequence of the centrifugal force of rotation. This was unexpectedly demonstrated by Richer when the French Academy sent him south to observe Mars in 1672. His clock had been regulated exactly in Paris, and he soon found that it lost time when set up at Cayenne. The amount of loss was found by observation, and it was exactly equal to the calculated effect that the reduction of gravity by centrifugal action should produce.

Also Newton saw that his law of gravitation would afford an explanation of the rise and fall of the tides. The water on the side of the earth toward the moon, being nearer to the moon, would be more strongly attracted toward it, and therefore raised in a tide. And the water on the farther side of the earth away from the moon, being at a greater distance than the earth itself, the moon would attract the earth more strongly than this ma.s.s of water, tending therefore to draw the earth away from the water, and so raising at the same time a high tide on the side of the earth away from the moon. As the earth turns round on its axis, therefore, two tidal waves continually follow each other at intervals of about twelve hours.

The sun, too, joins its gravitating force with that of the moon, raising tides nearly half as high as those which the moon produces, because the sun's vaster ma.s.s makes up in large part for its much greater distance.

At first and third quarters of the moon, the sun acts against the moon, and the difference of their tide-producing forces gives us "neap tides"; while at new moon and full, sun and moon act together, and produce the maximum effect known as "spring tides."

Newton pa.s.sed on to explain, by the action of gravitation also, the precession of the equinoxes, a phenomenon of the sky discovered by Hipparchus, who pretty well ascertained its amount, although no reason for it had ever been a.s.signed. The plane of the earth's equator extended to the celestial sphere marks out the celestial equator, and the two opposite points where it intersects the plane of the ecliptic, or the earth's path round the sun, are called the equinoctial points, or simply the equinoxes. And precession of the equinoxes is the motion of these points westward or backward, about 50 seconds each year, so that a complete revolution round the ecliptic would take place in about 26,000 years.

Newton saw clearly how to explain this: it is simply due to the attraction of the sun's gravitation upon the protuberant bulge around the earth's equator, acting in conjunction with the earth's rotation on its axis, the effect being very similar to that often seen in a spinning top, or in a gyroscope. The moon moving near the ecliptic produces a precessional effect, as also do the planets to a very slight degree; and the observed value of precession is the same as that calculated from gravitation, to a high degree of precision.

Newton died in 1727, too early to have witnessed that complete and triumphant verification of his law which ultimately has accounted for practically every inequality in the planetary motions caused by their mutual attractions. The problems involved are far beyond the complexity of those which the mathematical astronomer has to deal with, and the mathematicians of France deserve the highest credit for improving the processes of their science so that obstacles which appeared insuperable were one after another overcome.

Newton's method of dealing with these problems was mainly geometric, and the insufficiency of this method was apparent. Only when the French mathematicians began to apply the higher methods of algebra was progress toward the ultimate goal a.s.sured. D'Alembert and Clairaut for a time were foremost in these researches, but their places were soon taken by Lagrange, who wrote the "Mecanique a.n.a.lytique," and Laplace, whose "Mecanique Celeste" is the most celebrated work of all. In large part these works are the basis of the researches of subsequent mathematical astronomers who, strictly speaking, cannot as yet be said to have arrived at a complete and rigorous solution of all the problems which the mutual attractions of all the bodies of the solar system have originated.

It may well be that even the mathematics of the present day are incompetent to this purpose. When the brilliant genius of Sir William Hamilton invented quaternion a.n.a.lysis and showed the marvelous facility with which it solved the intricate problems of physics, there was the expectation that its application to the higher problems of mathematical astronomy might effect still greater advances; but nothing in that direction has so far eventuated. Some astronomers look for the invention of new functions with numerical tables bearing perhaps somewhat the relation to present tables of logarithms, sines, tangents, and so on, that these tables do to the simple multiplication table of Pythagoras.