[ Music ] >> Data skeptic features interviews with experts on topics related to data science, all through the eye of scientific skepticism. [ Music ] >> Tom Levenson is a professor at MIT and head of its science writing program. He is the author of several books including Einstein in Berlin and Newton the Counterfeitur, the unknown detective career of the world's greatest scientist. He's also made 10 feature-length documentaries, including the two-hour Nova program on Einstein, for which he won numerous awards. In his most recent book, The Hunt for Vulcan, he explores the centuries spanning quest to explain the movements of the cosmos via theory and the role that the hypothesized planet Vulcan plays in that story. Tom, welcome to Data skeptic. >> Thank you for having me. >> So The Hunt for Vulcan follows a number of important scientific thinkers and their contributions to the story, but we can begin with Edmund Hallie. Why was he the logical starting point? >> Edmund Hallie is just this marvelous figure who is so much more than the combat he got named after. But it really was, in this case, his role as kind of a gadfly and an editor to The Great Isaac Newton that made him the master starting point for this book, because pretty likely without Hallie going in, first asking the question and then when he got the most exciting answer he could conceive of, budging him until he actually delivered what became the sort of great book of the scientific revolution in Principia. You know, Newton would be remembered as a very smart guy who did amazing things that nobody knew about the last he died. It was Hallie who made Newton come out in public as an extraordinary figure that he in fact is. So I started there with Hallie making sure Newton got out there with what Newton himself later called the system of the world. >> And a book like this must naturally spend a good deal of time with Isaac Newton. I get the sense from reading this that in order to really have the depth of understanding of, you know, his work and his role in this and all his perspectives, you must have dug into a wide swath of historical references. But at the same time, this is a man whose century is old and I'm not so sure how available a lot of details about him are. I was wondering if you could share some of your process for how you uncovered historical facts and interesting things that helped you understand these characters. In this case, and in many cases, the place you started actually with the place where I started with the secondary literature. I try and find the best academic or public biographies of a figure and sort of get that sort of overview of the story. And if it's properly done, that first glimpse of the sources that were used to really generate a great life. And all the historical figures I do, I'm not a biographer. I really look at specific moments, specific incidents, and try and understand what they mean in the larger context of the place and time and what they happen. So the great thing about a biographer is they go through the whole story. And in Newton's case, there is just a magnificent biography called "Never at Rest" by Richard Westfall. And it's where everybody who writes on Newton since Westfall wrote that book starts. You know, you can't just stop there. You have to go into really the texture of the time. And the only way to do that is to read what the people of the time themselves were writing and to look at the objects they used and all that kind of stuff. And I have to say, a good piece of really rigorous, secondary literature gives you a doorway into that, but then you have to go through the doorway and do all the rest of the work. In Newton's case, there is, in fact, some remarkable scholarship that's been done. All of the letters are collected actually into bound volumes that are available at Good University Libraries and Colchine I've access to them. But it's papers. It's religious papers to scientific papers and got chemical stuff. Those are in the process. I mean, many of them, or much of them are all already online. They've been translated. It was just an extraordinary effort in the last 20, 30 years for a lot of these people to put to sort of an infrastructure of scholarship online. And then, you know, even with all that great digital stuff, there's no substitute for going there and finding the actual stuff. So for my original Newton book, there was a book prior to the Hunter-Loughton. I went to London, and I went to the Public Records Office, and I read through Newton's own documents, and the signatures on them and so forth, and written. And, you know, that's great, because I got some information that really wasn't anywhere else. And, you don't forget something that feels for them, and you can tell them you're getting pissed off because it's handwriting. It gets more cranking angry. And that's not something you can get from a digitized translation. So it's sort of a staged process. Start with the overview, and then dive deeper and deeper as elements of the story became clearer to me. Very interesting. So there's a number of characters in the book that have a bit of an uphill climb to get their theory put forward or their, you know, evidence to be compelling to the community. How readily accepted was Newton's theories and when the Principia was published? Newton's, Principia, Newton's mathematical description of nature, the laws of motion and the universal law of meditation, hit the European learned world like a bomb. Everybody who was capable of following the work, and it's complicated against work with mathematics that were extremely difficult for the times. And very new mathematics, all that sort of stuff. And some very new concepts and the whole idea of force was a hard one to, you know, Newton had to invent the concept of inertia before he could do analysis. I mean, there's a lot of new stuff. But even given all that strangeness in novelty and invention, pretty much all of naturally philosophic Europe recognized that this was hugely important and very persuasive piece of work. There was some argument, you know, we doubted the mathematics and it was clear that he had captured, you know, he managed to explain what had been really mysterious, like why it was that the planets travel and they're looking for orbits and so forth. But, you know, notions like this force of gravity kind of magically reaching out across space, instance in this actionary distance with no mechanism, no sort of crank or guide or anything to actually push the planets along. That was very, very hard for some people to take. In some way, the thing that really caused people to question Newton was not so much his results as his method in the worldview. I mean, the nearest he had to an intellectual equal in Europe saw this idea of gravity as a kind of almost occult, you know, verging on the blasphemous kind of idea, despite that argument, the overwhelmingly powerful structure of Newton's argument and the fact that it just worked was incredibly persuasive very quickly, to just let everybody qualify to have an opinion. - It seems to me most of the key players in the book, and maybe in science in general, start from a desire to find a theory that explains observations quite well and I think Newton is no exception to that. At some point though, it seems to me the scientific community historically found Newton's theories so compelling that we almost switched sides there and it was that we were so fond of this theory and so confident in it when the observations didn't agree. It was almost like there was a switch that we wanted to find observations that fit the theory or expand the theory. Am I looking at the correct way? Do you think there was a deep belief that Newton's theories were correct? - There was certainly a deep belief that Newton's theory was correct, but it wasn't a crazy belief. It wasn't an unsounded one or a very, very good reason practical evidence from doing the classical work of science to suggest that it was correct. I mean, in some ways, my whole book is about this question of kind of observations, how much experiments really persuade people to change their minds about something as fundamental as a theory or a worldview or a way of understanding big patterns in nature. And my answer really, I had this discussion, but by really diving into the story of Alton, it became pretty clear to me that it's actually, you know, the story we're told of science that it's a single brute fact and you just throw it in that's beautiful theory. You know, it's a myth and it's a hint of truth in it like many myths, but it's not really true. And there are lots of cases where it's not true at all. And what's more interesting in some ways is not that that story we tell ourselves to help us do our science doesn't always turn out to be true. That's interesting, but what's really interesting is why it isn't true and what it does to you. Here in Newton's theory is really interesting because for a century or more, after nearly for almost 150, the principle is published in 1687, and there isn't really a pronounced craft unit in any practical way until the mid 19th century. So it's a long time. And in that time, people extend Newton's mathematical innovations to more and more sophisticated forms of calculus and differential equations in ways that analyze them. And then you get increasingly powerful mathematical apparatus to study the motion of the planets and all the kinds of things Newton's theories explain more and more detail. And every time they do it, every time they come across a problem that looks really tricky, turns out with hard work and really interesting calculation and good mathematics, you can solve it. I mean, there was this weird interaction between Jupiter and Saturn, where Jupiter seemed to be speeding up and Saturn was speeding up and Saturn slowing down in its orbit. Looked like something that was just very hard to understand in light of the then state of Newtonian celestial mechanics. But then somebody came along with a class, one of the great mathematical astronomers of all time, and he did this incredibly feeding and scrying calculation. And he showed, in fact, no Newtonian gravitation fully explained that there's a bizarre resonance that occurs over centuries in the cycle repeats. And it's all explained by Newtonian gravitation at subtle effect. And then of course, that was the big one, which was the discovery of Neptune. Uranus was the first planet to be discovered that was beyond naked eye detection. Since ancient times, people have known about Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. And Uranus was the next one to be discovered. He was discovered essentially by accident. Somebody looking up doing a catalog of double stars and seeing what appeared to be double, that one of the two started to move in the telescope. And that was that became the planet Uranus, and it was a great discovery. And it's all the way to analyze and place in Newtonian systems to understand how the whole system works. And it turns out that there were perturbations in its orbit, there were things that weren't right, given what was known about all the existing planets, gravitational influences on them. And then let us, another great mathematical astronomer, Laveria, let's try and figure out, well, if all the things that we can see don't fully explain how this new planet Uranus moves. Perhaps there's yet another new planet, beyond Uranus, that has some gravitational effect on it, that would account for all of these new bubbles in its orbit that we can see. And calculators, I hope that it took him a while, and it was a difficult calculation, and he had to make some assumptions that were essentially guessers about the properties of this, important guess is the guesses about the properties of this hypothetical planet. And after a while, he sent a letter to some observational astronomers, that go look in that patch of sky, and you can see a disk of such and such a diameter, at roughly this brightness, and it should move against the background of the stars, and that would be a new planet. And they found some things that within a couple of hours, really, could point in the telescope at that site, and they saw it. There was nothing, nothing delivered into their hands by a calculation based entirely on the new theory. There was no reason not to think new theory was right. In fact, here you had in some sense of the ultimate confirmation. Yes, this is really the way the universe behaves. Yes, it's absolutely true. People had as just took as a given that Newtonian gravitation told you how the universe works. But you have to say that they had pretty darn good reason for believing that. - Yeah, I was struck by how exciting that must have been. I think it was Gell-A, was the scientist you mentioned, looked up and found it exactly where he was told to look. But I also understand that Leverier didn't have the easiest time convincing people to look where he wanted them to look, that there were other maybe theories people were exploring, like an unseen moon, or some variability in the gravitational constant. What was the sentiment at the time? How revolutionary was it that Gell-A should look where he was told to look? - That wasn't, I think, particularly revolutionary. I mean, yes, Leverierier had had some trouble. I mean, Neptune's a funny story because there were actually two people trying to do this calculation, Verier and Paris, and a man named Adams in Cambridge in England. And they were both doing essentially the same calculation, both very, very talented mathematicians, with very, very bombastic self-brandizing character, Adams' different self-effacing. And Adams had the problem, and he just couldn't get his British colleagues to look. And Leverier and he did sort of preliminary calculation, suggested more or less where it ought to be. And just, it didn't happen. So Leverier, he had the problem in the natural place for him to seek help in finding a planet would have been the Paris Observatory. But first of all, there were a lot of politics in Parisian academic circles, and I suppose there still are pretty routinely in academic politics, but there was certainly, you know, there's pretty much a blood port back then. And frankly, the Paris Observatory's instruments weren't in great shape at that point. So for one reason or another, Leverier actually spent two or three months trying to get just one of his homeboys to look for it, and he didn't. I know, again, I don't feel as if they doubted the calculation. He had been asked to do the calculation in the first place by one of the senior Parisian astronomers. In both England and in France, there's just this kind of surprising lack of urgency. To me, it's one of the mysteries. I mean, certainly through the British astronomers really missed a chance to get there first. And in a period when there was significant national competition that sort of touched everything from building of empire to intellectual accomplishment, whatever it may be, it's kind of surprising that neither the French astronomers in Paris, nor the British astronomers in Cambridge or at the Greenwich World Observatory, felt that this was something they should pay attention to. Whereas a letter to Berlin gets opened that day. Guys, they're sure, you know? - Thank you, tell us, go up and let's see what's there. And what this really tells you is not so much that there was resistance to the idea of people who didn't believe it. I mean, everybody really thought that this was a plausible thing to do, the best explanation for what was happening to Uranus. I think it was just a reminder that science is not a bloodless, automatic way of making knowledge. It's fully a human activity. People are sometimes swanky. And who the people you're doing, or who the folks you have around you at that moment can actually matter to whether or not Adams becomes the famous hero of Neptune or the variate. And even if it was at the time, there was a whole argument as to whether Adams deserves co-credit with the variate. And sort of for national, political reasons, everybody said, "Oh yes, well, we'll call them co-discoverers." They're certainly in British push that to you in every English language. But over time, the consensus of historians of astronomy has shifted pretty decisively to say Adams was certainly accomplished. She was certainly doing the right work, but Laveria did, in fact, get there first. I do want to talk a bit more about Laveria, but I'd like to take a step back. I feel like I didn't do justice to Laplace's role in all this. You'd mention that grinding calculation he did in analyzing the motions of Jupiter and Saturn. Could you share a bit more about why that was such a technical feat at the time? I mean, celestial mechanics is a really complicated, difficult calculation. Not so more when you have computers available to it, but when you have to work through the calculations by hand, it could be deeply intractable. The reason, of course, is there are a couple of reasons. One is, essentially, you have so many different variables affecting the motion at any time, and you have to integrate your calculation over time to predict a whole of it, right? So you have at any point in the planet's orbit, there are many objects that are affecting and you have to move to the next point, obviously the dominant influence of the sun, by far the largest body in the solar system in this. Greatest source of gravitational energy. But Jupiter has an effect on just about all upon its motions, particularly in the honker of the planet. And to a lesser degree, to an enormous degree, everything in the universe influences everything else. But within the solar system, for Mercury, Venus in particular, then Jupiter and then the Earth are the three largest influences on it. And you have to account for all of those. And to a smaller degree, Mars and some of the other objects. And so you've got, for everybody you're carrying an airline, and you've got all the other influences on them. Which means you have lots of questions. Each of these objects has its own orbit with its own amount of electricity, with the amount in which their orbit deviates from around. They're all angled slightly different. It's just in terms of managing the calculation. There are all these factors. There's all these precise calculations that you have to do. And when you're trying to find very small effects, resonances that occur over centuries, tiny wobbles this time. You have to be really, really precise. Some of these equations are nonlinear. And they either have to be linearized, or you have to solve the more difficult problem of solving a system of nonlinear equations. You know, there's just a lot of stuff. Newton, when he did it in the first place, solved the problem with two-body problems. Some of them have to show the orbit has to be elliptical and auditory stuff. And trying to solve the three-body problem, trying to analyze the motions of the moon, which you're of course influenced very much by the Earth as well as the sun. And it turned out that it was very, very hard to get it complete. It turns out actually to be functionally impossible to come up with a complete stable solution to the three-body problem. It gets tricky very, very fast. And Newton himself opened the gates to this kind of work. But great as he was, being just at the starting date, he didn't get that far into it. In the 18th century, following a number of great mathematicians and physicists or astronomers worked on it, not all but many of them centered in Paris. I mean, celestial mechanics became kind of a French thing. And a great deal of work being done there. And one of the greatest of them, really the greatest, was this man, Laplace, who set himself the task in the late 18th century of coming up with a complete period of the entire solar system, solving the whole solar system, the one grand system calculations that would ultimately provide a way to compute and position of every option as a solar system, indefinitely into the future or indefinitely into the past. And it was just a heroic piece of work. It got very, very far into action doing all that. The goal itself was ultimately unrealizable because it's the kind of parent that the solar system cannot be shown to be absolutely stable. But he took it as far as you could go in that time and just did magnificent work. Absolutely, yeah. As a data scientist myself, I'm very comfortable with the idea that when your observations don't match your theory, well, in my world, there had been two sources of error. I knew that there's the case where your model does not accurately describe the situation. There's also the case where you have instrumentation or measurement error, that the precision of how well you can measure something. And one of the ways I really treasured your book was it gave me this insight that I'd never thought of before when hearing Laplace's story, that at certain points in the pre-computer days, there was also error due to calculation, perhaps we could call it, that the complexity of the differential equations was so great, the error was almost simply because you didn't have enough pen and paper and time to confirm the model fit the data with all bodies involved. Fascinating realization for me. Just to interject it, two things that make Laplace, to me, is one of the sort of unsung heroes that hits your science, certainly in the English-speaking world, I don't think you'd be given any more near enough to do. One of the reasons is, I think, a particular interest to data scientists. You know about Bayesian statistics, right? For sure. And it's attributed, you know, the name refers to Mr. Bayes, you know, Reverend Bayes. It's largely obscure Victor in England, who first worked out the basic mathematics of it. It was really Laplace who took it, framed it, you know, rigorously methodically, and applied it for the first time as a way to assess the probability of error in first his astronomical calculations. But then, you know, Laplace was a pioneer in applying statistical analysis to what we now think of as sociology or political science. Looking at the ways, you know, data about human health and demographics and all these kinds of things were accessible to mathematical analysis. Bayes gets the name that Laplace genuinely is the first person to start thinking probabilistically about the analysis of the quality and the potential for error in his results. And I think it's, we should all be generally sort of in reflecting in his direction when we find ourselves doing data science and getting useful knowledge out of it. - Absolutely, couldn't agree more. Maybe I'm bringing my sort of contemporary modern prejudice to the table, but I look, you know, a few hundred years back at some of the technology they had for observing the skies and for taking measurements. And the devices seem really primitive to my modern eyes. And I'm impressed that people don't chalk things up to measurement error, just in that circumstance. You know, especially in the case of Uranus, that we would rather than, you know, disregard a small error, someone would conjure up a new entity. In fact, I really love the word choice you had that Laverier conjured a planet from his desk. And there it was when we looked for it. With that in mind, was it natural that he would then go look at Mercury and find anomalies there and conjure a new entity? - It was natural. And I would say also, it's always easy to underestimate the past. And we underestimate the past in a bunch of different ways. And the book actually sort of centers on a couple of them. But we shouldn't assume that the simplicity of the tools doesn't mean they can't do really extraordinary things. And also, you should never underestimate what necessity will do to you. Because of course, accurate knowledge of the night sky in detail was crucial for what Europeans in particular were doing, you know, in great Venus in those days, which is necessarily across open ocean when trying to not hit the rocks in the way and get to where they were going at the other end. There are a lot of reasons for people to want to be looking at and mapping and measuring the night sky and the precise position that the sun was crossing the horizon, all those kinds of things, really great proceeding. And it was, in fact, one of the unsung parts of the scientific revolution that people started doing this kind of measurement to increase in system and increase in rigor and increase in attention to the amount of error and repetition of the measurement to ensure that you minimize there are all those kinds of things. And you can even see it's conciprocuted, you know, at different points and even the lists, dozens and dozens of observations, for example, of the count of 1682 from all kinds of different observers. And spent some time, you know, weighing how good they all are and the actions, you know, only use the ones he thinks and make rigorously and so forth. So there's a culture of careful observation that's explicitly being nurtured as part of the scientific revolution wasn't just now. And it wasn't just ideas about physics. It was a whole social, the genuine social revolution in which people were persuaded to change their behavior to achieve the results that they wanted. It really means quite remarkable on some level how small the effects people like Reverier were trying to understand. But the one thing that I say over and over again in the book is, you know, Reverier in particular was very good at this, but many others, you know, that the effects they saw were real. They needed to be a little larger or smaller than they were first estimated, but they weren't conjuring up false problems. It was their proposed solutions to those problems that could get them into trouble. - There was another quote that struck me naturally as a data scientist that Leverier started looking for Vulcan at, you know, an earlier time in his life. And I guess either walked away from it or maybe there's not a lot of documentation about his search, but he returned to it and had some an advantage that his younger self didn't have, which was better data. Could you talk a bit about what that really meant and why that would help him return to the search? - Vulcan itself was mercury. - Oh, sorry, right. - Leverier followed his discovery of Neptune. We desired to repaint and expand what the pasta tried to do, which has come up with a complete theory of the entire solar system. That would show how it behaved. Now it is a new planet in it, and all these things are explained. In the course of doing that, you know, obviously you have to tackle mercury. The first time you tackle it, there were a limited series of observations. And mercury was the hardest of the known planets to observe 'cause it's so close to the sun. And, you know, you only see above the horizon for a little bit, like Venus, it's an evening and morning star, but it's traveled above the horizon even less than Venus does. You can observe it during solar transits, which are one of the ways you do achieve great precision because, you know, it's really pretty easy to time, precisely the moment the silhouette of a planet crosses the face of the sun. But transits are fairly rare. So you don't have very many of them. And as you get further and further back in time, you're less than less certain about how accurate their timekeeping was and so forth. So when we tried to crack mercury, and you can totally calculated when the next transits should occur, and there was actually one of these rare transits that were able to come. And you missed it by 16 seconds, which, you know, is not that much. And if you're sort of, if you're of a sort of modern mind, you could just say, well, you know, the data wasn't good enough for the time pieces at the observations you would put them up or what have. But the time pieces were good enough. And maybe the data wasn't good enough. But there was something wrong. And without more data, there were very, really couldn't crack it. He put the problem aside. There were plenty of other things to do. There was actually political revolution, and that was one of all the sort of stuff, and the academic politics and so on. So he couldn't get back to mercury for really a more than a decade. And when he did, Paris Observatory had made the beginning kind of real effort to do a sustained, very closely followed program of observation marketing, a lot more material to work with. And that's when we discovered the anomaly that let him off, let many people off on, but ultimately turned out to be a wild goose chase. - In searching for Vulcan, I think you covered a few times in the book that, you know, you can't prove a negative. So enough observations at a very hard to observe object doesn't necessarily tell us it's certainly not there. I would label this as the concept of falsifiability that is really a more modern concept. I think we got that from Karl Popper around the turn of the century. How much do you think the search for Vulcan contributed to that becoming a scientific way of thinking? - You know, again, I think there's a central philosophers, like Popper come along and label what are habits of mind of scientists long before they've gotten their name. There was at some point, an interesting sort of Vulcan, in some sense, the expectation that Vulcan should be there was perfectly sound science. There was an anomaly available to Mercury, the anomaly was and is real, and everyone at the time correctly believed it was real. You know, if we're very calculators and said there was just this kind of a fact, and it really was a one in 10,000 deviation from it's expected or so, but it was still there. Given that human experience in Neptune, given the fact that it's a new unit in the law is to calculate what would the kind of object that would cause such a deviation, there was no reason not to look for it. That's a perfectly reasonable way to approach doing this kind of astronomy. And over time, we thought lots and lots of stuff by noticing the effects on something we know about that are caused by something we don't see. Just for one huge example, I'm blanking on the name, but an astronomer at Princeton shared a Nobel Prize for his observation of the changing in behavior of a double star system in which one star was a neutron star or black hole that produces what he calculated to be a gravitational wave effect. You know, that's something that I'm predicting would exist, but there is a wave of all kinds of any gravitational wave in it, the wave motion pulls some energy out of the system. And this particular bizarre double star system was in this analysis, flying it the first time it was observed. Instead, many way we can observe gravitational wave effects through these indirect methods. And he had the work and behavior of the star you could see based on the existence of something that is unseen and known to be dared by a gravitational effect. And then he had to measure its motion and argue, in essence, that the motion that deviates from what you expect, given what we now know about the zero of gravity, are evidence for this thing that we hypothesize but have never observed directly what you've got a gravitational wave. And it's great science, political science. You know, the Nobel Prize was well awarded in this case. But it's all about stuff that we're looking essentially by any sense from the effects we see in something that we can observe that are driven by and stuff that isn't there, that isn't there, that isn't directly accessible to us. Absolutely nothing wrong with the search for this planet inside. Mercury, the problem comes when people start to see it. Yeah, so it's interesting that you walk through the process of a couple of observations that are then end up being declared in the popular press, at least, that Vulcan is real. I would presume that would not have been a radical claim at the time. Is that correct? Hello, I mean, again, hanging over his whole story of a story of Neptune. Neptune was discovered in exactly the same way that Vulcan was, quote, discovered, unquote. Eventually, much more of the results were presented in popular press than in that only kind of professional communication. But especially early on, these observations were reported in scientific literature, and Vulcan even made it onto some lists and textbooks at the then ninth planet. And it was seen by, oh, I don't know, there are at least a dozen reputable sightings of Vulcan either as a round object around silhouette in transit across the face of the sun or as a faint star-like object observed during the total solar eclipse. People who were retributable observers, people who had made discoveries in the past who were reporting that they had seen this thing. It should have been there. It had the moral right to be there, in some sense. Everything that people knew about how solar systems behave suggested it really ought to be there, and so people saw it. If we have Vulcan sort of declared real in a lot of textbooks and whatnot, and if I grab the quote correctly, I think you quoted Laverier saying this principle, this principle meaning Newton's theories, has acquired such a degree of certainty that we would not allow it to be altered. With this mountain of evidence and confirmation of Newton's theory, and indeed the discovery of Neptune through pen and paper, how much of a revolution was about to happen when a young upstart by the name of Albert Einstein came up with a different idea? It's a huge shift that comes, and it comes not just because it's sort of like, hey, you can imagine something where somebody, you know, writes down a system of equations to calculate something, and it works pretty well, and then somebody comes along, he says, well, if you change the math, you can see this, and it'll do a little better. And that's a significant change, right? That's an advantage. But what Einstein did, which he ultimately had, of course, to express rigorously, went mad at it, but what he did to really get to his theory of gravity, the one that was now recognized as our most and really correct one and the one that supplied Newton, he had to actually change the way we conceive of reality. It sounds huge, but it is huge, and it's true. Newton had assumed that there was this thing called, or Newton's picture describes the universe in which there are these forces that, in some ineffable way, are rooted in the masses and locations of plants that leap across them, and that space and time are just the tools you use to measure what's happening within the universe. So there's an absolute tick of time, one second, two seconds, three seconds. There's an absolute measure of distance, one meter, two meters, three meters. Same for everybody, same every circumstance, and that's the background against which you figure out how events occur. You know, they're driven by these themselves forces and these laws of motion. Einstein comes along and says, that's almost right, practically, and it's completely wrong conceptually. Time is not constant for every observer, distance is not constant for every observer, that's the special theory of reality. And then it moves towards including gravitation in that special theory, in the relativistic worldview, that moves along the way to general relativity. He realizes that space and time themselves are not untouched, unmoved movers, as it were, outside the purview. That's, you know, the great insight that the presence of matter and energy within space and time actually affects the shape of space and time. A great big hunk of matter like the sun will create a dent, a whole well in space time. And that object's moving through space time with lumps and bumps and holes and all that sort of stuff. We'll move on the shortest possible paths, but those paths won't be straight line. So the dip in bending around curves, and those curves are in, in fact, both space and time. It moves at different rates depending on where you are in a gravitational field, all this sort of stuff. We all adds up to saying, you know, the geometry of space time, you know, the shape of things affects the way things happen. Even as I say that out loud, I've worked on this for a long time, and I've looked at all the diagrams and I've talked about the physicists, and I understand it pretty well, and I deeply believe it to be true, because all the evidence is supported, it still sounds just flat-out weird. Right? It's a radically different way to think about reality than what Newton did. But in fact, it turns out the way our universe seems to work. And is that the nail and the coffin in the search for Vulcan? Absolutely. Because there's this sort of marvelous sequence of things. I can take time signing, you know, this is a big idea, and it's a difficult idea. It's a difficult idea conceptually, and Einstein has to spend some years just getting his head around the physical concepts he's trying to understand, learning how to spend more years trying to figure out and get help with the very, very difficult challenge in bringing into mathematics that he needs to describe this dynamic relationship between space time and matter energy. He starts in 1907, he comes up with what he thinks is almost way thinks is right, or almost right in 1913, five years, six years later, and still not quite right. And last in 1915, he gets the sort of final insights that allow him to recast his earlier work, find some errors, he would get almost got it, all this kind of stuff, and put together the final third. And he does this in a crazy work over about six weeks in October and early November, in Berlin, by himself. While everybody else is worrying about World World One, which is causing all this hardship and craziness and loss and destruction, I'm continuing there, working the math and thinking about gravity. And finally, three weeks into his series of lectures presenting his latest ideas to his colleagues at the Prussian Academy of Sciences, he reaches the point where the theory is almost completely right. And it's good enough now to start calculating actual real-world problems. He puts the problem of mercury, did this still unexplained radio view of motion, into his system of equations. And he works in 24 lines of calculation, and out at the end pops mercury's orbit. Just as it is described, observational, with no need for any extra body, no need for any extra gravitation, no need for Vulcan at all. Because what's happening instead is, in mercury being so close to the sun, is deep down in a dense and space-time made by the sun's weak mass. And that curves space-time well, creates precisely the shape of the orbit that we've observed. It's an effect of the geometry of space-time, not an effect that requires a Newtonian, got to get more gravity from somewhere kind of explanation. And once he does the calculation and he sees mercury dropout and realizes that's the most solid confirmation yet that his strange, weird, radical idea, it in fact true, he reports to his friends that it's just overwhelming to get actual palpitations in his chest. And his heart was shuddering inside his bodice kind of thing. Einstein was not given to extremes of emotions. He certainly wasn't given to admitting him to anyone. And yet there it is, when mercury come out right and realizes general relativity, he's finding after all those years of labor on solid foundation, he just briefly loses it. Yeah, it's an astounding find. Lastly, I wanted to ask you what you think the hunt for Vulcan can teach us about the frontiers of modern science? Well, in this sense, I think we have that we're not just more knowledgeable than our predecessors, but in some way we're smarter. We can see their mistakes and not make them and so forth and so on. And what for me at least, the story of the hunt for Vulcan, and both the fact that really competent, reputable people saw stuff that wasn't there. And then for 30 plus years, equally competent, reputable, great scientists decided just to ignore the problem of mercury time explained orbit and go on about their business. Suggests to me that it's really important to remember that in the long run science gets there, the day to day at scientists happening, it is entirely subject to the possibilities and limits of human imagination, human emotion, human desire. In that sense, we are no smarter than our predecessors. And we are almost making exactly the same kinds of mistakes that we are failing to notice critical facts that might be the similar ideas, that we are persuading ourselves in some of the things we think ought to be true are without checking the institution. And I don't know what feelings or ideas or claims, you know, people 100 years from now will look back on us and laugh and say, we'd never make that kind of mistake. But I am sure that we are making them possibly and ideas about consciousness and mental health, possibly in the way we are really in the midst of trying to reconstruct just how genes and their environment interact produce individual living bodies. There are lots of different places, strangely, even though there are some ideas that we just really think ought to be true. And maybe it's not, because we just can't, but suddenly, into the current worldview, facts that are really trying to tell us something with it. You know, I don't know what it could be, if anyone thinks it could be something I can't think of, but I can guarantee you that we actually aren't smarter than the very end. We aren't smarter than the class. We aren't smarter than Isaac Newton. We are more knowledgeable, but that knowledge alone doesn't mean that we're going to get out of our own way, that we aren't going to make mistakes, that we aren't going to look stupid to ourselves or to our grandchildren when they come to look at the things we got right and the things we didn't. Yeah, I think that's an absolutely great sentiment to keep in mind. Tom, I really want to thank you for coming on the show. I very much enjoyed having you, and I thought the book is fantastic. I really loved it. It's obviously work of nonfiction, but one of the things I appreciated was the way you use the characters of history to weave a true narrative and that really engages the reader. There's even a brief appearance by Thomas Edison that I won't spoil for the listeners because I hope they'll go out and pick up a copy at their local book reseller or at Amazon or wherever you like to get books. I encourage everyone to check out The Hunt for Vulcan. Where else can people learn about you online or your other books or some of the films you've done? I am in the process of building my proper online presence. Thomas Lovenson.com is still basically just a page we need to be popularly properly. It'll be up and running fully in three weeks. So that's comethlovenson.com. The Hunt for Vulcan.com or other Hunt for Vulcan.com will get you there. And otherwise, I can be checked out at the MIT website where you just go to MIT and search for Thomas Lovenson in the search box on the upper right hand side of the main page. And I'll take you through the work I do there. Excellent. Be sure to put all those links in the show notes as well. Well, thanks again for coming on the show, Tom. Thank you. And until next time, I want to remind everyone to keep thinking skeptically of and with data. [BLANK_AUDIO]
