Pioneers of Science Part 22

The later years of his life he spent in Copenhagen as a professor in the University and an enthusiastic observer of the heavens,--not a descriptive observer like Herschel, but a measuring observer like Sir George Airy or Tycho Brahe. He was, in fact, a worthy follower of Tycho, and the main work of his life is the development and devising of new and more accurate astronomical instruments. Many of the large and accurate instruments with which a modern observatory is furnished are the invention of this Dane. One of the finest observatories in the world is the Russian one at Pulkowa, and a list of the instruments there reads like an extended catalogue of Roemer's inventions.

He not only _invented_ the instruments, he had them made, being allowed money for the purpose; and he used them vigorously, so that at his death he left great piles of ma.n.u.script stored in the national observatory.

Unfortunately this observatory was in the heart of the city, and was thus exposed to a danger from which such places ought to be as far as possible exempt.

Some eighteen years after Roemer's death a great conflagration broke out in Copenhagen, and ruined large portions of the city. The successor to Roemer, Horrebow by name, fled from his house, with such valuables as he possessed, to the observatory, and there went on with his work. But before long the wind shifted, and to his horror he saw the flames coming his way. He packed up his own and his predecessor's ma.n.u.script observations in two cases, and prepared to escape with them, but the neighbours had resorted to the observatory as a place of safety, and so choked up the staircase with their property that he was barely able to escape himself, let alone the luggage, and everything was lost.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 77.--Diagram of equatorially mounted telescope; CE is the polar axis parallel to the axis of the earth; AB the declination axis. The diurnal motion is compensated by motion about the polar axis only, the other being clamped.]

Of all the observations, only three days' work remains, and these were carefully discussed by Dr. Galle, of Berlin, in 1845, and their nutriment extracted. These ancient observations are of great use for purposes of comparison with the present state of the heavens, and throw light upon possible changes that are going on. Of course nowadays such a series of observations would be printed and distributed in many libraries, and so made practically indestructible.

Sad as the disaster was to the posthumous fame of the great observer, a considerable compensation was preparing. The very year that the fire occurred in Denmark a quiet philosopher in England was speculating and brooding on a remarkable observation that he had made concerning the apparent motion of certain stars, and he was led thereby to a discovery of the first magnitude concerning the speed of light--a discovery which resuscitated the old theory of Roemer about Jupiter's satellites, and made both it and him immortal.

James Bradley lived a quiet, uneventful, studious life, mainly at Oxford but afterwards at the National Observatory at Greenwich, of which he was third Astronomer-Royal, Flamsteed and Halley having preceded him in that office. He had taken orders, and lectured at Oxford as Savilian Professor. It is said that he pondered his great discovery while pacing the Long Walk at Magdalen College--and a beautiful place it is to meditate in.

Bradley was engaged in making observations to determine if possible the parallax of some of the fixed stars. Parallax means the apparent relative shift of bodies due to a change in the observer's position. It is parallax which we observe when travelling by rail and looking out of window at the distant landscape. Things at different distances are left behind at different apparent rates, and accordingly they seem to move relatively to each other. The most distant objects are least affected; and anything enormously distant, like the moon, is not subject to this effect, but would retain its position however far we travelled, unless we had some extraordinarily precise means of observation.

So with the fixed stars: they were being observed from a moving carriage--viz. the earth--and one moving at the rate of nineteen miles a second. Unless they were infinitely distant, or unless they were all at the same distance, they must show relative apparent motions among themselves. Seen from one point of the earth's...o...b..t, and then in six months from an opposite point, nearly 184 million miles away, surely they must show some difference of aspect.

Remember that the old Copernican difficulty had never been removed. If the earth revolved round the sun, how came it that the fixed stars showed no parallax? The fact still remained a surprise, and the question a challenge. Picard, like other astronomers, supposed that it was only because the methods of observation had not been delicate enough; but now that, since the invention of the telescope and the founding of National Observatories, accuracy hitherto undreamt of was possible, why not attack the problem anew? This, then, he did, watching the stars with great care to see if in six months they showed any change in absolute position with reference to the pole of the heavens; any known secular motion of the pole, such as precession, being allowed for. Already he thought he detected a slight parallax for several stars near the pole, and the subject was exciting much interest.

Bradley determined to attempt the same investigation. He was not destined to succeed in it. Not till the present century was success in that most difficult observation achieved; and even now it cannot be done by the absolute methods then attempted; but, as so often happens, Bradley, in attempting one thing, hit upon another, and, as it happened, one of still greater brilliance and importance. Let us trace the stages of his discovery.

Atmospheric refraction made horizon observations useless for the delicacy of his purpose, so he chose stars near the zenith, particularly one--[gamma] Draconis. This he observed very carefully at different seasons of the year by means of an instrument specially adapted for zenith observations, viz. a zenith sector. The observations were made in conjunction with a friend of his, an amateur astronomer named Molyneux, and they were made at Kew. Molyneux was shortly made First Lord of the Admiralty, or something important of that sort, and gave up frivolous pursuits. So Bradley observed alone. They observed the star accurately early in the month of December, and then intended to wait six months.

But from curiosity Bradley observed it again only about a week later. To his surprise, he found that it had already changed its position. He recorded his observation on the back of an old envelope: it was his wont thus to use up odd sc.r.a.ps of paper--he was not, I regret to say, a tidy or methodical person--and this odd piece of paper turned up long afterwards among his ma.n.u.scripts. It has been photographed and preserved as an historical relic.

Again and again he repeated the observation of the star, and continually found it moving still a little further and further south, an excessively small motion, but still an appreciable one--not to be set down to errors of observation. So it went on till March. It then waited, and after a bit longer began to return, until June. By September it was displaced as much to the north as it had been to the south, and by December it had got back to its original position. It had described, in fact, a small oscillation in the course of the year. The motion affected neighbouring stars in a similar way, and was called an "aberration," or wandering from their true place.

For a long time Bradley pondered over this observation, and over others like them which he also made. He found one group of stars describing small circles, while others at a distance from them were oscillating in straight lines, and all the others were describing ellipses. Unless this state of things were cleared up, accurate astronomy was impossible. The fixed stars!--they were not fixed a bit. To refined and accurate observation, such as was now possible, they were all careering about in little orbits having a reference to the earth's year, besides any proper motion which they might really have of their own, though no such motion was at present known. Not till Herschel was that discovered; not till this extraordinary aberration was allowed for could it be discovered.

The effect observed by Bradley and Molyneux must manifestly be only an apparent motion: it was absurd to suppose a real stellar motion regulating itself according to the position of the earth. Parallax could not do it, for that would displace stars relatively among each other--it would not move similarly a set of neighbouring stars.

At length, four years after the observation, the explanation struck him, while in a boat upon the Thames. He noticed the apparent direction of the wind changed whenever the boat started. The wind veered when the boat's motion changed. Of course the cause of this was obvious enough--the speed of the wind and the speed of the boat were compounded, and gave an apparent direction of the wind other than the true direction. But this immediately suggested a cause for what he had observed in the heavens. He had been observing an apparent direction of the stars other than the true direction, because he was observing from a moving vehicle. The real direction was doubtless fixed: the apparent direction veered about with the motion of the earth. It must be that light did not travel instantaneously, but gradually, as Roemer had surmised fifty years ago; and that the motion of the light was compounded with the motion of the earth.

Think of a stream of light or anything else falling on a moving carriage. The carriage will run athwart the stream, the occupants of the carriage will mistake its true direction. A rifle fired through the windows of a railway carriage by a man at rest outside would make its perforations not in the true line of fire unless the train is stationary. If the train is moving, the line joining the holes will point to a place in advance of where the rifle is really located.

So it is with the two gla.s.ses of a telescope, the object-gla.s.s and eye-piece, which are pierced by the light; an astronomer, applying his eye to the tube and looking for the origin of the disturbance, sees it apparently, but not in its real position--its apparent direction is displaced in the direction of the telescope's motion; by an amount depending on the ratio of the velocity of the earth to the velocity of light, and on the angle between those two directions.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 78.--Aberration diagram. The light-ray L penetrates the object-gla.s.s of the moving telescope at O, but does not reach the eye-piece until the telescope has travelled to the second position.

Consequently a moving telescope does not point out the true direction of the light, but aims at a point a little in advance.]

But how minute is the displacement! The greatest effect is obtained when the two motions are at right angles to each other, _i.e._ when the star seen is at right angles to the direction of the earth's motion, but even then it is only 20", or 1/180th part of a degree; one-ninetieth of the moon's apparent diameter. It could not be detected without a cross-wire in the telescope, and would only appear as a slight displacement from the centre of the field, supposing the telescope accurately pointed to the true direction.

But if this explanation be true, it at once gives a method of determining the velocity of light. The maximum angle of deviation, represented as a ratio of arc radius, amounts to

1 1 ------------ - 0001 = ------ 180 57-1/3 10,000

(a gradient of 1 foot in two miles). In other words, the velocity of light must be 10,000 times as great as the velocity of the earth in its...o...b..t. This amounts to a speed of 190,000 miles a second--not so very different from what Roemer had reckoned it in order to explain the anomalies of Jupiter's first satellite.

Stars in the direction in which the earth was moving would not be thus affected; there would be nothing in mere approach or recession to alter direction or to make itself in any way visible. Stars at right angles to the earth's line of motion would be most affected, and these would be all displaced by the full amount of 20 seconds of arc. Stars in intermediate directions would be displaced by intermediate amounts.

But the line of the earth's motion is approximately a circle round the sun, hence the direction of its advance is constantly though slowly changing, and in one year it goes through all the points of the compa.s.s.

The stars, being displaced always in the line of advance, must similarly appear to describe little closed curves, always a quadrant in advance of the earth, completing their orbits once a year. Those near the pole of the ecliptic will describe circles, being always at right angles to the motion. Those in the plane of the ecliptic (near the zodiac) will be sometimes at right angles to the motion, but at other times will be approached or receded from; hence these will oscillate like pendulums once a year; and intermediate stars will have intermediate motions--that is to say, will describe ellipses of varying excentricity, but all completed in a year, and all with the major axis 20". This agreed very closely with what was observed.

The main details were thus clearly and simply explained by the hypothesis of a finite velocity for light, "the successive propagation of light in time." This time there was no room for hesitation, and astronomers hailed the discovery with enthusiasm.

Not yet, however, did Bradley rest. The finite velocity of light explained the major part of the irregularities he had observed, but not the whole. The more carefully he measured the amount of the deviation, the less completely accurate became its explanation.

There clearly was a small outstanding error or discrepancy; the stars were still subject to an unexplained displacement--not, indeed, a displacement that repeated itself every year, but one that went through a cycle of changes in a longer period.

The displacement was only about half that of aberration, and having a longer period was rather more difficult to detect securely. But the major difficulty was the fact that the two sorts of disturbances were co-existent, and the skill of disentangling them, and exhibiting the true and complete cause of each inequality, was very brilliant.

For nineteen years did Bradley observe this minor displacement, and in that time he saw it go through a complete cycle. Its cause was now clear to him; the nineteen-year period suggested the explanation. It is the period in which the moon goes through all her changes--a period known to the ancients as the lunar cycle, or Metonic cycle, and used by them to predict eclipses. It is still used for the first rough approximation to the prediction of eclipses, and to calculate Easter. The "Golden Number"

of the Prayer-book is the number of the year in this cycle.

The cause of the second inequality, or apparent periodic motion of the stars, Bradley made out to be a nodding motion of the earth's axis.

The axis of the earth describes its precessional orbit or conical motion every 26,000 years, as had long been known; but superposed upon this great movement have now been detected minute nods, each with a period of nineteen years.

The cause of the nodding is completely accounted for by the theory of gravitation, just as the precession of the equinoxes was. Both disturbances result from the attraction of the moon on the non-spherical earth--on its protuberant equator.

"Nutation" is, in fact, a small perturbation of precession. The motion may be observed in a non-sleeping top. The slow conical motion of the top's slanting axis represents the course of precession. Sometimes this path is loopy, and its little nods correspond to nutation.

The probable existence of some such perturbation had not escaped the sagacity of Newton, and he mentions something about it in the _Principia_, but thinks it too small to be detected by observation. He was thinking, however, of a solar disturbance rather than a lunar one, and this is certainly very small, though it, too, has now been observed.

Newton was dead before Bradley made these great discoveries, else he would have been greatly pleased to hear of them.

These discoveries of aberration and nutation, says Delambre, the great French historian of science, secure to their author a distinguished place after Hipparchus and Kepler among the astronomers of all ages and all countries.

NOTES TO LECTURE XI

_Lagrange_ and _Laplace_, both tremendous mathematicians, worked very much in alliance, and completed Newton's work. The _Mecanique Celeste_ contains the higher intricacies of astronomy mathematically worked out according to the theory of gravitation. They proved the solar system to be stable; all its inequalities being periodic, not c.u.mulative. And Laplace suggested the "nebular hypothesis" concerning the origin of sun and planets: a hypothesis previously suggested, and to some extent, elaborated, by Kant.

A list of some of the princ.i.p.al astronomical researches of Lagrange and Laplace:--Libration of the moon. Long inequality of Jupiter and Saturn.

Perturbations of Jupiter's satellites. Perturbations of comets.

Acceleration of the moon's mean motion. Improved lunar theory.

Improvements in the theory of the tides. Periodic changes in the form and obliquity of the earth's...o...b..t. Stability of the solar system considered as an a.s.semblage of rigid bodies subject to gravity.

The two equations which establish the stability of the solar system are:--

_Sum (me^2[square root]d) = constant,_

and

_Sum (m tan^2[theta][square root]d) = constant;_