In The Philosophical Breakfast Club, Laura Snyder pins the rise of science as we know it on the weekly meetings of four great 19th-century thinkers
ON THE night of 14 July 1830, British astronomer John Herschel
In The Philosophical Breakfast Club, Laura Snyder pins the rise of science as we know it on the weekly meetings of four great 19th-century thinkers
ON THE night of 14 July 1830, British astronomer John Herschel nearly discovered Neptune. Charting stars with his large reflector telescope, he swept within half a degree of the planet, but he didn't realise what he had missed until October, when the German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle caught the orb passing near Capricorn.
Nonetheless, Herschel was delighted. While Uranus had been found by pure luck five decades earlier by Herschel's father, Galle had located Neptune based on mathematical predictions. Discovering Uranus had been a personal victory, but discovering Neptune was a victory for science. And, as Laura Snyder relates in her masterful portrait of science in the 19th century, science's triumph was Herschel's, too.
Herschel came of age in a time of transition. When he...
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