Commentary: Wonders - Neptune, Velikovsky and the Name of the Game; September 1996; Scientific American Magazine; by Gingerich; 2 Page(s)

For young John Couch Adams, a new planet figuratively swam into view when, as a University of Cambridge undergraduate, he wrote, "Formed a design of investigating...the irregularities in the motion of Uranus which are yet unaccounted for; in order to find out whether they may be attributed to the action of an undiscovered planet beyond it...."

Uranus had been discovered 62 years earlier, in 1781, by William Herschel. In 1843, with its period of 84 years, Uranus had not quite made a complete cycle around the sun since its detection. But a few "prediscovery" observations had turned up, whereby astronomers had recorded its position under the assumption that it was a star. By the early 1800s those positions obtained before 1781 had become a problem--an orbit that could represent the "modern" observations simply didn¿t fit.