Abstract
THE Astronomer Royal does not see eye to eye with me in my judgment of Airy, in connexion with the Neptune controversy, as expressed in my article in Nature for November 9. This article, which was written in response to an editorial request, was a summary of the two addresses—dealing with different aspects of the discovery of Neptune—which I gave at the centenary commemoration on October 8; these addresses were themselves a summary of a fairly long ‘essay’ (if I may call it so) written at the invitation of the Council of the Royal Astronomical Society and accepted, as I understand, by the Council for eventual distribution to the fellows in one of the Society's publications. The ‘essay’ is a historical study of events of a century ago, and I was very conscious throughout its preparation that I must follow the methods of the historian as efficiently as I knew how. The job of the historian, as I see it, is to elicit facts, to present these in proper form, and to paint as accurate and complete a picture as possible. The ‘essay’ was accordingly built up on a very large amount of historical documents—I explain in the ‘essay’ how many of these became available, for the first time, for a study of the Neptune controversy, in which Sir Harold's great predecessor was in many ways the dominant figure.
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SMART, W. G. B. Airy and the Discovery of Neptune. Nature 158, 830 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/158830a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/158830a0
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