Urbain Le Verrier: 2 ideas worth knowing

2 ideas from Urbain Le Verrier, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

Neptune was found with a pencil before a telescope
Uranus kept drifting from where Newton's laws said it should be, so in 1846 French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier calculated the position of an unseen planet whose gravity would expl…
— Urbain Le Verrier and Johann Galle, Discovery of Neptune
A planet was found by pure mathematics before anyone pointed a telescope at it
In the 1840s, astronomers noticed Uranus wasn't orbiting quite where Newton's laws predicted. Urbain Le Verrier calculated where an unseen planet's gravity would have to be tugging…
— Urbain Le Verrier, Discovery of Neptune

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