Not every wobble or precession is a planet. Nobody would know this less better than La Verrier – who with the point of his pen proclaimed “Let there be Neptune!” and there it was. He couldn’t put the genie in the bottle twice when he again proclaimed, “Let there be Vulcan!” and there was none. Interesting chapter of science well-encapsulated in the book ‘The Hunt for Vulcan’ by Thomas  Levenson. Frankly I had no idea about this pseudo-planet “Vulcan” which was pandering to Newton’s Law of Gravity only to be smoked by Einstein’s General Theory of relativity for good. 

Science is the pursuit of objective truth. If a theory doesn’t match observation, you either add more nuance to the theory to make the picture sharper or chuck it altogether. Scientists on the other hand, are humans. And humans do get blinded by very human foibles of arrogance, jealousy, a keen desire of wish-fulfillment and inertia. As Newton’s First Law of motion states, “An object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion, unless an outside force acts on it”, the outside force in this case was Einstein and his extraordinary way of thinking. Without this outside force, nobody dared even think that there could be anything wrong with Newton’s gravity. Laplace was happy complicating everyone’s lives with complex mathematics straddling the original theory; La Verrier and his ilk hunted down real and faux planets in pursuit of tying gravity down to human calculation in pursuit of predicting the future just as clearly as one has lived the past.

But Newton’s law couldn’t completely explain away Mercury’s precession. The best minds pursued a non-existent planet like prospectors during the Gold rush of California, but they never stopped to question the Old Master. It took another Master to make them see the light.

It also shows the value of original thinking. Einstein really had a unique bend of imagination, and enough self-assuredness in his ideas to challenge Newton. It makes one respect him a lot more.  There might be folks who are smarter than Einstein, better than him at maths – but what he did – shook the very foundation of the human pursuit of science. The rest of the folks were working on just that – incremental progress on a flawed theory, trying to chisel away some nuggets – one Laplacian transform at a time. Einstein shifted the paradigm. Levenson’s book does a good job setting the context of that time in history and how monumental a role Einstein played to challenge the norm of the day.

Sometimes, it pays to not follow the herd. Don’t hunt for Vulcan because everyone else is doing so, sometimes imagine – how would you feel and behave when you travel at the speed of light!