Abstract
One of the first converts to Kepler’s elliptic astronomy was a young Englishman, Jeremiah Horrocks (or Horrox). He was born in 1619 at Toxteth, then a small village near Liverpool, and was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Horrocks’s goal was to correct Kepler’s theories of planetary motions in order to bring them into closer agreement with observation.1 Perhaps his most important work was in devising an accurate theory of the motion of the Moon. He also devoted much effort to understanding the motion of Venus. In October 1639, Horrocks was at Hoole, Lancashire, a rather desolate site, bordered by a morass on the east and Marton Mere and the Douglass River on the south. There he repeated the calculations of the times of the planet’s transits. Kepler had predicted no such events until 1761, but Horrocks found that a transit was due to take place on November 24, 1639 (old style; the new style date is December 4, 1639). He and his friend, William Crabtree, a draper and fellow astronomer at Broughton near Manchester, succeeded in observing it—thus becoming sole witnesses of an event not to be repeated for 122 years.
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Notes and References
For information on Horrocks, the following have been consulted: Rev. Arundell Blount Whatton, Memoir of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Jeremiah Horrox (London, 1859),
J. E. Bailey, The Palatine Note-books, abridged in The Observatory 6, 318–328 (1883),
Allan Chapman, Three North Country Astronomers (Manchester: Neil Richardson, 1982), and
Chapman, “Jeremiah Horrocks, the transit of Venus, and the ‘New Astronomy’ in Seventeenth Century England,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 31, 333–357 (1990).
Robert Grant, History of Physical Astronomy (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852) p. 424.
Chapman, Three North Country Astronomers, 36.
Vincent Wing, An Ephemerides of the Coelestial Motions for XIII Years, beginning Anno 1659, ending Anno 1671 (London, 1658).
William Stukeley, Memoirs of Newton’s Life. 2752; Being Some Account of His Family and Chiefly of the Junior Part of His Life (London: Taylor and Francis, 1936), pp. 46–47.
Quoted in Richard Westfall, The Life of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 22.
Ibid., 23.
A. Rupert Hall, “Newton’s Note-book, 1661–1665,” The Cambridge Historical Journal IX (no. 2), 249 (1948).
D. T. Whiteside, ed., The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 8 volumes, 1967–1980), vol. 1, p. 148.
Stukeley, ibid., 82.
Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 51. The other accounts are given by Henry Pemberton, A View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (London, 1728), preface and a MS by Newton himself, which reads: “I began to think of gravity extending to ye orb of the Moon &... from Keplers rule of the periodical times of the Planets being in sesquilaterate proportion of their distances from the center of their Orbs, I deduced that the forces wch keep the Planets in their Orbs must [be] reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about wch they revolve: & thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon in her Orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth, & found them answer pretty nearly.”
Hooke to Newton, January 17, 1680; Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 313.
Principia, Book I, proposition i, theorem i; the converse, given the areal law, that the force must be directed toward the center, is proved in the next proposition.
Principia, Book I, propositions x and xi.
Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 403.
Quoted by A Wilson in “The Newtonian Achievement in Astronomy,” in R. Taton and C. Wilson, editors, Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics, Part A: Tycho Brake to Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 253.
Quoted in Westfall, Never at Rest, 406.
Quoted in Ivars Peterson, Newton’s Clock: Chaos in the Solar System (New York, W. H. Freeman and Company, 1993), 87.
Letter of Newton to Bentley, Jan. 17, 1692–93; in Works of Richard Bentley (London, 1838), vol. 3, pp. 210–211.
Ibid.
Grant, History, 30.
Ibid., 38.
Principia, Book I, prop. XLI, problem xxi.
Sir John F. W. Herschel, Outlines of Astronomy (New York, 10th ed., 1857), 411.
Westfall, Never at Rest, 443.
Seth Ward, Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford; quoted in Frank E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), 294.
David Gregory, memorandum September 1, 1694, Correspondence, IV, 7.
Newton to Flamsteed, April 23, 1695; Correspondence, IV, 106.
Newton to Flamsteed, July 9, 1695; Correspondence, TV, 143.
Whiteside, “Newton’s Lunar Theory: From High Hope to Disenchatment,” Vistas in Astronomy, 19 317–328:320 (1976).
Ibid., p. 324.
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© 1997 Richard Baum and William Sheehan
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Baum, R., Sheehan, W. (1997). Le Grand Newton. In: In Search of Planet Vulcan. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6100-6_3
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