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posted by FatPhil on Monday December 12 2016, @03:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the orbital-mockanics dept.

Bad Astronomy has an article about an astronomer who had observational data to suggest he had discovered a planet around another star and published his findings in a peer-reviewed journal. In 1855.

We now know, with further, more accurate observations, that no such planet exists there, and the offsets are the product of uncertainty in the telescopic observations that were, to be fair, done by eye.

But still, despite that, I must tip my hat to Jacob. He did his homework, made the best observations and calculations he could, expressed skepticism in his writing, and came up with what he thought was the best explanation. Mind you, again to be fair, this took a great deal of cleverness to dream up. Perhaps he had been influenced by the recent discovery of Neptune.

If anything, he was guilty of overconfidence in his own measurements. Still, technology eventually caught up with his imagination and we did start to find alien worlds. The field of exoplanet research is now a thriving one, which has moved beyond the simple discovery stage to one where we are beginning to physically categorize and model them.

Not so incidentally, we have since found planets orbiting other stars using the method Jacob pioneered in 1855. He may have been the first person ever to publish this idea, and for that he deserves acknowledgment.

This short video gives some more information and context of the man and his (unfortunately erroneous) discovery. The original paper is also freely available.


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  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday December 12 2016, @08:27PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 12 2016, @08:27PM (#440535) Journal

    Ah, but even if you don't realize it there's a lot you don't know that you know you don't know.

    It wouldn't be hard for you to list trivial facts that are easy to find out that you don't know:
    How wide is your left foot? At the ball? At the heel? What's its volume?
    How wide is the Nile River? What's the flowrate at the delta? What country owns what share of the water rights?
    Who was king when the Collosus of Rhodes was built? How much copper is in it? How much did it cost at the time?

    Now, I asked several related questions in each category of unknown, because the last question is one where the answers to the previous questions could establish theoretical boundaries on getting the right answer. Where being able to approximate through existing knowledge could help prevent you from making a mistake in determining the answer to the final question.

    That's an essential tool in science. In practice, we often treat those unknowns through a process of experimental control, letting them vary as other independent variables to determine the magnitude of the effect. If you can't identify everything the current best theories suggest might introduce error to your tests, you don't even have a hypothesis.

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