The Point Of A Pen
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The Point Of A Pen
Douglas Mercer
August 25 2024
Some say seeing is believing and other that believing is seeing----it’s always a matter of which goes first, the cart or the horse. In truth it’s an interplay between the one and the other until soon you find yourself sitting on a pile of candy. Sleuthing is a matter of deduction (inducing comes later), one roams the field and gathers known facts and as far as the unknown goes you work by both trial and error and then by the final process of elimination. If all other theories are untrue the last theory standing, however outlandish, must be true. And one can use rhetoric or polemics against anything, one can dispute and argue with anyone on any topic and on any issue, but reality is the one thing you can’t contravene, the only thing that is incontrovertible. Whatever words mean who is to be master, that is all.
The planet Neptune was mathematically predicted before it was directly observed. With a prediction by Urbain Le Verrier, telescopic observations confirming the existence of a major planet were made on the night of September 23–24, 1846, at the Berlin Observatory, by astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle (assisted by Heinrich Louis d’Arrest), working from Le Verrier's calculations. It was a sensational moment of 19th-century science, and dramatic confirmation of Newtonian gravitational theory. In Francois Arago’s apt phrase, Le Verrier had discovered a planet with the point of his pen.
This was a signal moment for European man, as if they were beginning to conjure spirits from the vasty deeps or as if interstellar space had become their backyard. One can call it triangulation or whatever one wants, but earthbound men using pen and paper and mind were able to posit an invisible entity and be sure it was there. From time immemorial all bodies had simply been seen with the eyes; both on earth and in the sky; and then men made their instruments to increase the power of the eye but Neptune was something yet again. No eye, and no eye with the aid of a device, saw this; this was seen in the mind’s eye; this was a purely theoretical discovery. When the time came had they asked the ones doing the positing what they would think if no body was there they might have said then the worse for the universe; or the less creator it. If it did not exist one would have had to invent it but of course it was there, just as was said, not predicted, but said. The way you search a field long enough and traverse all the spaces and you know it’s there, like an invisible sun, a wonderful star on which a lot more than Neptune’ s empire depends.
August 25 2024
Some say seeing is believing and other that believing is seeing----it’s always a matter of which goes first, the cart or the horse. In truth it’s an interplay between the one and the other until soon you find yourself sitting on a pile of candy. Sleuthing is a matter of deduction (inducing comes later), one roams the field and gathers known facts and as far as the unknown goes you work by both trial and error and then by the final process of elimination. If all other theories are untrue the last theory standing, however outlandish, must be true. And one can use rhetoric or polemics against anything, one can dispute and argue with anyone on any topic and on any issue, but reality is the one thing you can’t contravene, the only thing that is incontrovertible. Whatever words mean who is to be master, that is all.
The planet Neptune was mathematically predicted before it was directly observed. With a prediction by Urbain Le Verrier, telescopic observations confirming the existence of a major planet were made on the night of September 23–24, 1846, at the Berlin Observatory, by astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle (assisted by Heinrich Louis d’Arrest), working from Le Verrier's calculations. It was a sensational moment of 19th-century science, and dramatic confirmation of Newtonian gravitational theory. In Francois Arago’s apt phrase, Le Verrier had discovered a planet with the point of his pen.
This was a signal moment for European man, as if they were beginning to conjure spirits from the vasty deeps or as if interstellar space had become their backyard. One can call it triangulation or whatever one wants, but earthbound men using pen and paper and mind were able to posit an invisible entity and be sure it was there. From time immemorial all bodies had simply been seen with the eyes; both on earth and in the sky; and then men made their instruments to increase the power of the eye but Neptune was something yet again. No eye, and no eye with the aid of a device, saw this; this was seen in the mind’s eye; this was a purely theoretical discovery. When the time came had they asked the ones doing the positing what they would think if no body was there they might have said then the worse for the universe; or the less creator it. If it did not exist one would have had to invent it but of course it was there, just as was said, not predicted, but said. The way you search a field long enough and traverse all the spaces and you know it’s there, like an invisible sun, a wonderful star on which a lot more than Neptune’ s empire depends.