Far Beyond Neptune
Walsh, James J.
FAR BEYOND NEPTUNE By JAMES J. WALSH A GOOD deal of fun has been poked at man's assumption of a certain lordship of the universe of which he used to be so proud. It has become rather the custom...
...These expressions do not represent mere figures of speech...
...When the astronomers mapped out the course of Uranus, they were surprised to find that it would not keep the schedule they had mapped out for it...
...This was not surprising because the other latest-known planet, Neptune, had been found in the same way...
...Pessimism may minimize, but this human mind of ours is significant to a degree that exceeds the boundaries of all the universes...
...Now that the earth is proclaimed by many to be just one of the minor planets of a solar system probably not by any means the largest in the universe of things as they are, on which an accidental concatenation of conditions in the carbon compounds brought life into existence with human life as the culmination of that very interesting happening, it would seem as though man ought to take on a humbler attitude and realize something of his pettiness...
...The event confirmed the prediction...
...Uranus, the planet beyond Jupiter, had been discovered by Sir John Herschel, astronomer royal in England, by searching the heavens with a telescope...
...The speculations of the astronomers became the facts of celestial mechanics...
...When men first proposed to make calculating machines, it seemed almost like blasphemy, for arithmetical processes were supposed to represent reason almost at its highest...
...Under present conditions when the universe has been multiplied to many millions of times the size that it was supposed to be a few hundred years ago, it would seem to be utterly absurd for man to continue to harbor these thoughts as to his importance and the consequent inference as to immortality, though that might very well have been expected, or at least borne with under the circumstances of things as they were supposed to be known before...
...Man's poetry, his painting and sculpture, his architecture—all these count for far more than man's mathematical ability...
...Now the human mind has reached out far beyond Neptune, but just as infallibly, to discover this new planet...
...These are represented by certain powers that man rightly calls creative, because they resemble so closely the power of the Creator to produce something out of nothing...
...The basic material for it must be acquired from without by observation...
...It has been pointed out over and over again that while man believed himself so important it was easy for him to imagine and even to persuade himself that he surely would not die and end it all as did the animals, and that his personality must be expected to endure in immortality...
...Years ago Professor Percival Lowell with no aid but paper and pencil, a table of logarithms and his own mathematical genius, came to the conclusion that there was another planet revolving around the sun beyond Neptune and then proceeded with those very simple materials to demonstrate just where it could be found...
...Someone once said, "Man is greater than anything that he can grasp...
...Uranus was that there was another planet influencing it by the attraction of what we call gravitation, interfering in various ways with its carefully mapped-out course...
...great as that is, it is at best only inferential...
...It was not a mere chance hit that the discoverer made, no find by the way in the course of telescopic sweeping of the heavens, for the observer had been told just where to look for the hitherto unseen world and it was there that he found it...
...There are those who would identify brain with thinking power, and who would suggest that thought is largely or perhaps entirely a function of matter...
...And yet even discoveries of this kind do not represent the greatest of man's achievements...
...Yet he has reached out a matter of 3,000,000,000 miles and has picked out a star very similar in appearance to the other stars but very different in nature, as it proves to be a hitherto unknown planet...
...It has become rather the custom to scoff at man's presumption of personal significance, situated as he is in the midst of the incommensurable elements that make up the universe...
...Leverrier working in France and Adams in England, found the solution of the problem about the same time...
...About the middle of the nineteenth century, astronomers began to declare that the reason for these divagations in the revolutions of...
...Sometimes it came in ahead of their time table, and sometimes it was behind time...
...When the earth seemed the centre of the universe and man the lord of the earth, such conceit might be tolerated, but with the growth of our knowledge of astronomy, especially since Copernicus's time, man's supremely insignificant place in the universe of things as they are, has been emphasized to such a degree as apparently to make his pretensions ridiculous...
...As the lord of the world in the older time, man might be expected to be of special interest to the Creater Himself, Who made the uniTHE COMMONWEAL May 14, 1930 verse as we know it and keeps it going by His conservating activity...
...What an interesting conditioned reflex that would be which spanned 3,000,000,000 miles...
...How strange it is that this brain of, let us say, five by eight inches of material, should reach out across a space of 3,000,000,000 miles and grasp this hitherto unknown planet...
...They proclaim realities...
...Almost needless to say this is not the limit of human grasp, for man's understanding of the universe is not limited by our solar system...
...That may be tolerated in humanly directed movement but not in the stars...
...And yet, when it is recalled just how this latest discovery in astronomy was made man's significance rises strikingly in the scale...
...Seven centuries ago Ramon Lullius, the great Spanish philosopher and theologian, suggested that he could make a logic machine from which, by the introduction of appropriate propositions, conclusions could be drawn...
...About that time Tennyson, the English poet laureate, declared that you cannot pluck a flower without moving a star...
...The creative power of man is something very different, something ever so much more sublime, and yet this discovery of the new planet cannot but demonstrate how almost infinitely greater man and his mind are than it has been the custom to proclaim, particularly in recent years...
...Leverrier wrote to an astronomer friend and said that if he would look into a certain part of the heavens on a particular night, he would find a star not down on his star maps, and observation would show that that star moved and really was a planet...
...He is superior to anything that he can comprehend...
...It is so small an object in space that it required a number of observations to make sure of the character of the starlike body which had hitherto seemed to be just one of the myriad stars in the heavens, but the prophecy of its existence had been veridical and the event was exactly what the mind of man had determined beforehand...
...Find the planet...
...Man's reach is not longer than his grasp, for he is already able to tell us so much about this new planet that manifestly it will not be long before anyone who wishes to be may be quite familiar with the course in the heavens of this stranger who has just swum into our ken...
...Two mathematicians, one in Paris and the other in Cambridge, England, sat down to solve the very interesting problem: "Uranus's irregularities in its course indicate the existence of a planet outside of it, influencing its revolutions...
...As it is, surely man seems to be the merest of mortals with no special reason for feeling that the Great Power behind the universe should be particularly interested in him...
...As a poetic affirmation of Newton's law that every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle of matter with a definite force, that was a happy formula...
...As I have said, a favorite commonplace of the intellectual-minded in our day has been man's absurd superiority complex as to his importance in the universe...
...Adams had solved the problem quite as successfully as Leverrier but as he was a younger man, only in his middle twenties, his suggestion in the matter was not taken so seriously as that of Leverrier, and the English astronomers failed to find the planet until after the announcement had been made from the continental observatory...
...He can reach out just as confidently to the starry universe beyond any of the planets, beyond our solar system to other solar systems and to distances in the heavens that can be calculated only by using as a unit the almost incredible term, a year of light...
...Adam's calculations, however, were just as accurate and just as absolute as those of Leverrier and the human mind had reached out and solved one of the great problems of the universe merely by its power of intelligence and without any of the accessory aids from the senses that are supposed to be so necessary for the acquisition of knowledge...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 2
