Horrocks’ investigations, so far as they could be collected, were published posthumously in 1672, and seldom, if ever, has a man who lived only twenty-two years originated so much scientific knowledge.
At this period British science received a lasting impetus by the wise initiation of a much-abused man, Charles II., who founded the Royal Society of London, and also the Royal Observatory of Greeenwich, where he established Flamsteed as first Astronomer Royal, especially for lunar and stellar observations likely to be useful for navigation. At the same time the French Academy and the Paris Observatory were founded. All this within fourteen years, 1662-1675.
Meanwhile gravitation in general terms was being discussed by Hooke, Wren, Halley, and many others. All of these men felt a repugnance to accept the idea of a force acting across the empty void of space. Descartes (1596-1650) proposed an ethereal medium whirling round the sun with the planets, and having local whirls revolving with the satellites. As Delambre and Grant have said, this fiction only retarded the progress of pure science. It had no sort of relation to the more modern, but equally misleading, “nebular hypothesis.” While many were talking and guessing, a giant mind was needed at this stage to make things clear.
7. SIR ISAAC NEWTON—LAW OF UNIVERSAL GRAVITATION.
We now reach the period which is the culminating point of interest in the history of dynamical astronomy. Isaac Newton was born in 1642. Pemberton states that Newton, having quitted Cambridge to avoid the plague, was residing at Wolsthorpe, in Lincolnshire, where he had been born; that he was sitting one day in the garden, reflecting upon the force which prevents a planet from flying off at a tangent and which draws it to the sun, and upon the force which draws the moon to the earth; and that he saw in the case of the planets that the sun’s force must clearly be unequal at different distances, for the pull out of the tangential line in a minute is less for Jupiter than for Mars. He then saw that the pull of the earth on the moon would be less than for a nearer object. It is said that while thus meditating he saw an apple fall from a tree to the ground, and that this fact suggested the questions: Is the force that pulled that apple from the tree the same as the force which draws the moon to the earth? Does the attraction for both of them follow the same law as to distance as is given by the planetary motions round the sun? It has been stated that in this way the first conception of universal gravitation arose.[[1]]
Quite the most important event in the whole history of physical astronomy was the publication, in 1687, of Newton’s Principia (Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica). In this great work Newton started from the beginning of things, the laws of motion, and carried his argument, step by step, into every branch of physical astronomy; giving the physical meaning of Kepler’s three laws, and explaining, or indicating the explanation of, all the known heavenly motions and their irregularities; showing that all of these were included in his simple statement about the law of universal gravitation; and proceeding to deduce from that law new irregularities in the motions of the moon which had never been noticed, and to discover the oblate figure of the earth and the cause of the tides. These investigations occupied the best part of his life; but he wrote the whole of his great book in fifteen months.
Having developed and enunciated the true laws of motion, he was able to show that Kepler’s second law (that equal areas are described by the line from the planet to the sun in equal times) was only another way of saying that the centripetal force on a planet is always directed to the sun. Also that Kepler’s first law (elliptic orbits with the sun in one focus) was only another way of saying that the force urging a planet to the sun varies inversely as the square of the distance. Also (if these two be granted) it follows that Kepler’s third law is only another way of saying that the sun’s force on different planets (besides depending as above on distance) is proportional to their masses.
Having further proved the, for that day, wonderful proposition that, with the law of inverse squares, the attraction by the separate particles of a sphere of uniform density (or one composed of concentric spherical shells, each of uniform density) acts as if the whole mass were collected at the centre, he was able to express the meaning of Kepler’s laws in propositions which have been summarised as follows:—
The law of universal gravitation.—Every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle with a force varying inversely as the square of the distance between them, and directly as the product of the masses of the two particles.[[2]]
But Newton did not commit himself to the law until he had answered that question about the apple; and the above proposition now enabled him to deal with the Moon and the apple. Gravity makes a stone fall 16.1 feet in a second. The moon is 60 times farther from the earth’s centre than the stone, so it ought to be drawn out of a straight course through 16.1 feet in a minute. Newton found the distance through which she is actually drawn as a fraction of the earth’s diameter. But when he first examined this matter he proceeded to use a wrong diameter for the earth, and he found a serious discrepancy. This, for a time, seemed to condemn his theory, and regretfully he laid that part of his work aside. Fortunately, before Newton wrote the Principia the French astronomer Picard made a new and correct measure of an arc of the meridian, from which he obtained an accurate value of the earth’s diameter. Newton applied this value, and found, to his great joy, that when the distance of the moon is 60 times the radius of the earth she is attracted out of the straight course 16.1 feet per minute, and that the force acting on a stone or an apple follows the same law as the force acting upon the heavenly bodies.[[3]]