This noble and lovely queen died, as related in the history of Sicily, that is, in consequence of a heavy labour, during which she gave birth to a son, who was a man as great in himself as he was unfortunate in his undertakings. The king believed the physician's statement, that the said termination to this accouchement was caused by the too chaste life the queen had led, and believing himself responsible for it, he founded the Church of the Madonna, which is one of the finest in the town of Palermo. The Sire de Monsoreau, who was a witness of the king's remorse, told him that when a king got his wife from Spain, he ought to know that this queen would require more attention than any other, because the Spanish ladies were so lively that they equalled ten ordinary women, and that if he wished a wife for show only, he should get her from the north of Germany, where the women are as cold as ice. The good knight came back to Touraine laden with wealth, and lived there many years, but never mentioned his adventures in Sicily. He returned there to aid the king's son in his principal attempt against Naples, and left Italy when this sweet prince was wounded, as is related in the Chronicle.
Besides the high moralities contained in the title of this tale, where it is said that fortune, being female, is always on the side of the ladies, and that men are quite right to serve them well, it shows us that silence is the better part of wisdom. Nevertheless, the monkish author of this narrative seems to draw this other no less learned moral therefrom, that interest which makes so many friendships, breaks them also. But from these three versions you can choose the one that best accords with your judgment and your momentary requirement.
Honore de Balzac “In Which it Demonstrated that Fortune is Always Feminine”
12 April 1866
It was late afternoon before Auwers had truly begun what he needed to do: pack for the railroad journey that would take him Coppenhagen, and thence by ship to England. He had wished to go by way of Paris, but he knew that the travel through the extra principalities would drag on and would cost more because of the additional fees. He finally decided that the extra time on board ship would give him a chance to ponder what had been put before him. He would also spend a day with d’Arrest, and sent off a post to tell him, though, in truth, he would probably arrive not long after the letter. It was well settled.
He had looked through the calculations and was already forming as strategy. As Foerester had told him, there were numbers available much better than Encke’s published solar parallax, and these accorded with the larger solar system and, hence, a faster speed of light. They also did not accord with the earth based observations. He decided to work backwards from Romero – the very old observations from the 17th century which had first established that light had a velocity, because events with the Jovan moons came later and later as the Earth sped away from it, and then returned to time as the earth sped towards it. His own numbers, which he had worked out sometime ago, gave a velocity of light almost precisely 300,000km a second. If this were multiplied by the distance from Sun to the earth, then it would mean that the earth was slightly less than 150 million kilometers from the sun. Working backwards over Encke’s own numbers, he attained a solar parallax which accorded with this quite closely. It is only by, willfully, excluding correct adjustments and including observations which included the problem of the “black drop” that he attained a lower figure and a lower speed of light.
This left Encke’s solar system too small for there to be a band for “Vulcan”, as that astronomer’s careful figures showed. The correct numbers left a gap for Vulcan, but, at the same time, left no room in the error band for Venus’s own orbit. In otherwords, if he used one set of numbers which disproved Vulcan, he had to create an enough error for Vulcan to possibly exist in its peturbation of Venus. If, on the other hand, he used the right figures, ones which allowed there to be a place for Vulcan, it would prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that such a planet could not exist, because it would have to show its effects on Venus in a measurable way.
There was only so much error to go around. Hide Vulcan in Venus’ error, and there was no room for it around the Sun. Hide it in the light, and there was no room in Venus. And that is why the obsession with Jupiter – there were ways of making the dragon of the solar system create the needed peterubations. If one stretched them to the limits they could move the earth enough to make all of the problems go away, But it was a cosmic billiards shot of fantastic complexity – Jupiter had to be perfectly right. And that is only for current observations with their error. And Auwers knew that the old observations, which Encke did not have, would have exploded this possibility. Again, there was only so much error – if one hid the precession of Mercury by using the most favorable Earth precession, then one could not use observations that went back more than 60 years or so, because then the error could be reduced down. It was like the tide going out – the water of errors allowed all sorts of imaginary geographies to be hidden, and now it was being revealed, and shoals long mapped were turning out to be false or long since worn to sand.
He continued to stare at the most recent set of rapid figurings as he walked up to the taxi, having sent off by post messages explaining that he had to leave early for London. He did not mind simply going off, it was like an astronomer anyway.
The train journey began with him packed among others, who gradually departed. He was bent over his numbers, scratching with a pencil and using rubber to cast out his false starts. He did not try to juggle the numbers to get everything to fit. He knew that if Encke could not, he would not either. Instead his approach was to isolate all the error in one place. It was a tactic he would use over and over again: instead of trying to distribute error through everthing, and hope that it all went away, push it into one place, and then see if some single systematic error could explain that error – a loose screw, a bad mirror, a distortion, an atmospheric effect, an instrument that was systematically in error one way and not another. To find the ghost in the machine, and then show a better machine could produce the correct results, and all else was already correct.
Thus he compiled what he called “cases of systematic error”, and annotated ideas as to what could cause each, implausible stories were discarded. What remained, had to be checked.
It was then that his internal universe was unsettled, a woman sat down across from him. It was not as violent a breach of protocol as it might be – he looked around to see that the train was indeeded crowded.
“Do any of you gentleman mind? The train has seats no other.”
Her German had a lilt, a space to it that implied her origins in Scandanavia, or perhaps someplace more exotic. Her features were not severe, but they were tautly strung, as if she did not eat well. Her very blonde hair was pulled back very hard and then tied into large curles with decorative ribbons holding them in place, it was underneath a broad brimmed hat – that had a slight nod to riding style, and that was of good material, but showed being worn. Her dress, likewise, was made of good material that had been worn too much or too often or too long. She had puffed sleeves, and shawl. Underneath it was clear that the dress was off the shoulders, in a fashion from England, and the bustle was flat in the front. Her demeanor was of a lady who was determined to get what she wanted.
Auwers merely looked slightly surprised, raise his eyebrows and opened his mouth slightly, and then gave a curt, Prussian, nod, to this lady dressed in off white.
A few stops later, the other two occupants left the train, and he was left in the coach alone, though, at that moment mostly absorbed in his work, with only the occasional glances upward out the window and at the lady, he noticed more the greater space for his shoulders.
It was on one of these glances upward that he noticed, very carefully, the one aspect of her which was unusual.
She held in her hand, again worn with use, but the title distinctly clear.
Principia Mathematica.
- - -
Now he spent some time staring at this, because it was unusual to ever see this book outside of a university setting, and it was even more strange to see it in the hands of a woman. Auwers did not have a condescending attitude towards women or their intellectual capabilities, but he was unused to looking at one who had any evidence of being able to attain the rigors of calculation or depth. He corresponded with many exceptional women, such as Florence Nightengale, whose work in medical statistics was easily the equal of any man, including the great astronomers, that he had met in industry and attention.
But he had not, until this moment, been faced with an example of a woman, as thinker. He then chided himself, perhaps she is just carrying it.
“Do you read it?”
She looked up at him, her head had been resting on her hand, she had been looking out, lost in thought.
“I have studied it for a long time, and taken notes many.”
She opened the book to him, and he could see, scrawled in the margins, in a fine and delicately precise hand, equations, figures and drawings. He opened his face as a way of asking “may I look?” To which she responded by handing him over the book itself. He thumbed through it. There were drawins, clearly taken from some small telescope, charting the moons of Jupiter. There were drawings of the moon in phases, taking account of the terminator line. There were calculations of the orbit of Mars from observations, which seemed to be her own, since they were idiosyncratic to Copenhagen.
“You must know d’Arrest.”
She shook her head vigorously.
“I was sent to find Artur Auwers, but he had already left, they said for England. So I took this train back.” She looked crestfallen.
“Well then you have accomplished in your mission. I am Georg Fredric Arthur Auwers, on my way to London by way of Copenhagen. I was intending to stop and see him there.”
“Oh that is good, you must read this.”
She proffered a small envelop, with d’Arrest’s seal on it.
He tore it open and read, each word causing him more discomfort than the one before
“By the time you read this you will no doubt have been briefed on the so called scandal from Foerster and Galle. The are both excellent men, completely trustworthy, and Foerester would not hurt a fly. I have long experience with Galle who is a great observer. So it is not to cast the least diminishment on the reputations of these men that I write this. But write this I must. You are embarking on a perilous journey, one which will end many years after my death, and probably after yours as well.”
“There is a cloud that falls on men. Over their eyes, and blinds them to the truth until they are ready for it. It is not the first man to see, it is the first man to understand who has made the great discovery. Enclosed you shall find a drawing, it will seem nothing exceptional, except that it is a drawing of Neptune and Jupiter together. It was found among some notes of Galileo. He saw it long before LeVerrier?, long before I asked Galle to look in that place. Long before the grinding of the wheels, long before there was even a Newtonian truth to compare observation with. Somethings must be believed to be seen.”
“This is why I send you the following calculations. There is no scandal. There is a precession of Mercury beyond which any Newtonian object may account for. According to my own numbers there is a small belt where there may lie a few small vulcanid objects, and some sun grazing comets, but no such planet. You will grind through all of the observations back as far as man looked skyward, and you will find no acceptable observations of Jupiter or Venus will which will allow for it.”
“It is not for this that you are being sent to chase the old data. For what purpose I do not know, there is a confusion that draws men to it. There is something that we are ready to see, because we are ready to believe. It is that you are being called to. The Venus transit is nothing – as you can see, there is enough data here and now to calculate solar parallax beyond the precision needed for any earthly cause. We are measureing the cost with ever finer rulers, finding it getting longer each time.”
“Do not come to visit me in Copenhagen. Do not go to or through it. I am being watched, by who or what I care not to speculate upon. But that Encke, Halle, Foerester and others have fallen prey to missing obviously correct numbers tells me that it holds us in our grip. That it meddles with our minds. Perhaps it is a demon of our own creation, perhaps it is another which is imposed upon us. This is beyond any competence which I possess or care to possess. The occultists are like the alchemists. I doubt astrology, but without it we would have no stronomy. I doubt alchemy, but not the chemistry that it toys with. I doubt most medical science before our own generation – but I do not doubt that there is a science to medicine. We are standing on an age, and perhaps we will find that the occultists, like the alchemists and astrologers and doctors of another age, playing with fire that comes like lightening strike from heavan.”
“That this is true is shown by this old drawing, and another which I have seen in a medieval archive – for a telescope. The glass of the time was fine enough. If only some Arabic explorer of the sky, or earlier had had the wit to grind the glass, we would have seen Neptune before the shores of the Americas. Men were not ready to see, so they did not look. But we are to stare face to face with it, and this generation must prepare for it. You must, whatever that truth is. But like Moses, I doubt either of us shall live to see it. Or perhaps believe it, and therefore not see it at all.”
"But in all events have greater caution and greater care. Because there is a confusion that bends men’s minds before they will believe what they need to see.”
d'Arrest