As we go along we shall develop the acceptance that astronomers might as
well try to squeeze blood from images as to try to seduce symbols into
conclusions, because applicable mathematics has no more to do with
planetary inter-actions than have statues of saints. If this denial that
the calculi have place in gravitational astronomy be accepted, the
astronomers lose their supposed god; they become an unfocussed
priesthood; the stamina of their arrogance wilts. We begin with the next
to the simplest problem in celestial mechanics: that is the formulation
of the inter-actions of the sun and the moon and this earth. In the
highest of mathematics, final, sacred mathematics, can this next to the
simplest problem in so-called mathematical astronomy be solved?
It can not be solved.
Every now and then, somebody announces that he has solved the Problem of
the Three Bodies, but it is always an incomplete, or impressionistic,
demonstration, compounded of abstractions, and ignoring the conditions
of bodies in space. Over and over we shall find vacancy under supposed
achievements; elaborate structures that are pretensions without
foundation. Here we learn that astronomers can not formulate the
inter-actions of three bodies in space, but calculate anyway, and
publish what they call the formula of a planet that is inter-acting with
a thousand other bodies. They explain. It will be one of our most
lasting impressions of astronomers: they explain and explain and
explain. The astronomers explain that, though in finer terms, the mutual
effects of three planets can not be determined, so dominant is the power
of the sun that all other effects are negligible.
Before the discovery of Uranus, there was no way by which the miracles
of the astro-magicians could be tested. They said that their formulas
worked out, and external inquiry was panic-stricken at the mention of a
formula. But Uranus was discovered, and the magicians were called upon
to calculate his path. They did calculate, and, if Uranus had moved in a
regular path, I do not mean to say that astronomers or college boys have
no mathematics by which to determine anything so simple.
They computed the orbit of Uranus.
He went somewhere else.
They explained. They computed some more. They went on explaining and
computing, year in and year out, and the planet Uranus kept on going
somewhere else. Then they conceived of a powerful perturbing force
beyond Uranus—so then that at the distance of Uranus the sun is not so
dominant—in which case the effects of Saturn upon Uranus and Uranus upon
Saturn are not so negligible—on through complexes of inter-actions that
infinitely intensify by cumulativeness into a black outlook for the
whole brilliant system. The palæo-astronomers calculated, and for more
than fifty years pointed variously at the sky. Finally two of them, of
course agreeing upon the general background of Uranus, pointed within
distances that are conventionally supposed to have been about six
hundred millions of miles of Neptune, and now it is religiously, if not
insolently, said that the discovery of Neptune was not accidental—