Author Archives: Jenelle Parson

Alternate History: Discovery of Neptune

16 Sunday Oct 2011

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Neptune was almost discovered by Galileo, but he mistook it for a star. Lalande, a French astronomer who created tables of the planetary positions also recorded Neptune’s position but also thought it was a star. One of the people responsible for discovering Uranus, John Herschel, also thought that it was a star. When Delambre was computing tables of Uranus, he discovered discrepancies in the position. He noted that there were discrepancies. During his time at Cambridge, John Couch Adam decided to begin investigating the irregularities of Uranus’ orbit. At relatively the same time, a French astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier also recognized the irregularities in the orbit of Uranus and thought this was due to an undiscovered planet. He then did computations based upon Newton’s gravitational laws and deduced the location of the undiscovered planet. Le Verrier gave his calculations to Johann Gottfried Galle who discovered the planet Uranus.

John Couch Adams

According to many stories, and as stated in Jacquard’s Loom, the reason why the planet was not discovered due to Adam’s calculations was because “[i]nstead of instigating a major telescopic search that would almost certainly have resulted in the discovery of the new planet, Neptune, Airy chose not to act on Adam’s information.” (104). Due to Airy overlooking Adam’s calculations, it was decided that Adams and Le Verrier needed equal credit in the discovery of Neptune. However, according to the Neptune file, found again in 1998, this is not the full story.

Urbain Le Verrier

In the file it is revealed that instead of being ignored by Airy, Adams was actually vague and inconsistent in his planetary position. Adam’s predictions ranged over 20 degrees of the sky, and after the planet was searched for during six-weeks at the Cambridge University Observatory was still not found. This was far different than Le Verrier’s calculations, which were one degree off of the actual planet’s location. Galle found the planet in half an hour. From Adam’s journal transcriptions, it shows “him still working on a problem which (one gathers) it was first necessary to solve in order to achieve a full solution.” (Kollerstrom, 5.42). After Galle’s discovery based on Le Verrier’s prediction, British astronomers contrived a selected story of events. Only Adam’s more accurate mathematical results were made public and made to appear as if Adam’s had the predicted the exact location of the planet. While Le Verrier protested at the time, it was in vain. He became very bitter about the lack of recognition for his work.

The God Neptune

If there was a difference machine to facilitate in Le Verrier’s calculations, I feel that he would have predicted the location of the planet quicker. While a difference machine would also help Adam, it was shown that his earlier calculations were more accurate than his later ones. For this reason I suspect that Adam’s predictions would have just become continually worse. From this, I feel that Le Verrier would be proven as the true discoverer of Neptune, and Adam would be recognized for his calculations and work to discover the location of the planet, but wouldn’t be considered a co-discoverer.

If it had not been for the lack of recognition of his discovery, I feel that Le Verrier would have been a more likeable person and wouldn’t have been so unpopular. This would have resulted in a more productive appointment as director of the Paris Observatory and probably would not have ended in him being overthrown and when later reinstated, stripped of most of his authority. This productive appointment would have led to more astronomical discoveries. This amount of astronomical discoveries would have caused Paris to be a center of astronomical discovery.

One such astronomical discovery, I feel, would have happened sooner is the discovery of Pluto. Since Le Verrier had already done work on the orbit of Neptune, I feel that if the orbit of Neptune would have continued to be tracked Le Verrier would have discovered perturbations in the orbit due to the planet Pluto. Such perturbations would have been linked through Newtonian orbital theory, which could have been further developed by Le Verrier if his view on Newtonian orbital theory had not been poisoned by his lack of recognition for the discovery of Neptune. Such an early discovery of Pluto would give it historical significance as a planet, and perhaps its planetary status would not have been taken away.

Sources:

Coimbra, Miguel. “Neptune – God of the Seas and Oceans.” Web. 12 Oct. 2011. <http://www.miguelcoimbra.com/images/gallery2.php?bimg=galerie/books/2romans/neptune.jpg&l=820&h=820>

Essinger, James. Jacquard’s Web. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.

Kollerstrom, Nicholas. “Recovering the Neptune Files.” RAS Research (2003): 5.23-5.24. Web. 12 Oct. 2011. <http://www.dioi.org/kn/neptunefile.pdf>

O’Connor, John, and Edmund Robertson. “Neptune and Pluto.” The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive. University of St Andrews. Sept. 1996. Web. 12 Oct. 2011. <http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/HistTopics/Neptune_and_Pluto.html>

O’Connor, John, and Edmund Robertson. “Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier.” The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive. University of St Andrews. Dec. 1996. Web. 12 Oct. 2011. <http://www.gap-system.org/~history/Biographies/Le_Verrier.html>

“Portrait of John Couch Adams.” DSpace. University of Cambridge. 2008. Web. 12 Oct. 2011. <http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/214762>

Sheehan, William. “Secret Documents Rewrite the Discovery of Neptune.” Social Sky & Telescope: The Essential Magazine of Astronomy (2003): n. pag. Web. 12 Oct. 2011. <http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/3307531.html>

“Urbain Le Verrier.” Random Knowledge. WordPress. 11 Mar. 2008. Web. 12 Oct 2011. <http://randomknowledge.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/urbain-le-verrier/>

William, David. “Neptune Fact Sheet”. Planetary Fact Sheets. NASA. Nov. 2010. Web. 12 Oct. 2011. <http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/neptunefact.html>

Class Summary 10/10: Hollerith and the Census

10 Monday Oct 2011

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In class today we talked about the results from the survey passed out during last class. It was found that people liked the concept map as well as learning about Ada and Babbage’s relationship. It was also found that people were unclear on how the analytical machine and other machines worked. Dr. Wagstaff encouraged us, if we were interested, to consider doing our final project on it, so that we may explain how it works to the class. Also, people were unclear on how much work Ada actually did on the notes and how much Babbage helped her. The fact is that we’re really not sure how much she did and probably never will. Also, the vast majority thought that the class work was about right at the moment. However, Dr. Wagstaff has decided to drop one of the assignments, so that we have two weeks to do each assignment.

In class, we had an activity where we wrote two questions that we would put on a “quiz” about the reading from last time. The first one being a “how” question and the second being a “why” questions. The questions were passed around and each person had to write down the answered and then the answers were passed around and “graded”. We then discussed things that we found interesting about the questions and answers.

  1. How did Hollerith’s machine get and store data?

1890 punch-card template for Pantograph

Punched cards were used to input data. These were put in the machine which interpreted them. We thought that it was interesting that the machine had constraints on what would be considered valid data. These constraints included that cards could only be put in one way. This was done by making one of the corners of the card cut at an angle. This way the card could only be putting the reader one way. Another restraint was that the card was considered invalid if two mutually exclusive things were entered. So for example if male and female were selected the card was considered invalid. Also, if the user was only looking at one type of cards (males for instance) if another type of cards (females for example) was inputted it would be tossed out.

Woman operating a Pantograph

Cards were punched through a pantograph, which was basically a template through which holes were punched. The machine was composed of a tabulator and a sorter. Click here for some good images of the machine. The tabulator counted up everything by lowering down a tray with pins attached to it; if there were was a hole where the pin was it would go through the hole into a cup of liquid mercury. The mercury acted as a very good conductor and would make an electrical current. Part of the reason mercury was used is that the whole device was hooked up to a battery (they didn’t have a power grid during this time), so the voltage across the device was very poor. The sorter flipped open the bin to put in the card, but someone still had to manually put each card in the sorter.

2. Why was it necessary for Hollerith to make this machine

With the 1890 census it would not be able to finish the census before the next census (in 10 years). The 1880 one took 7 years to complete and there were more people in 1890 than 1880. For the 1890 census there was a race to see what method/machine could do the best, which would be used for the next census. One was Hollerith’s machine, one was a chip method which used different colored paper, and one was the slip method which used different colored ink. They had a race in which they had to process 10,000 cards. The chip method took 110.933 hours for transcription and 44.683 hours for tabulation, the slip method took 144.4167 hours for transcription and 55.367 hours for tabulation, and Hollerith’s method took 72.45 hours for transcription and 5.467 hours for tabulation. So, that makes Hollerith’s method a little over twice as fast as the chip method and a little over two and a half times as fast as the slip method.

We talked also about how single-minded Hollerith was. Hollerith only thought of one use for his machine: the census, and didn’t consider his machine’s usefulness for other scenarios, such as other data entry.

Next we went through an activity to see how long it would take for our hometown’s census to be processed back in the day. With Hollerith’s machine it took 25 seconds/person for transcription and 2 seconds/person for tabulation.

Example for my hometown: Sherwood, OR

Population 18,194

Transcription=25*18194=4.55E5 seconds=7.58E3 minutes=1.26E2 hours=5.26 days

Tabulation=2*18194=3.64E4 seconds=6.065E2 minutes=10.1 hours

Total=1.36E2 hours=5.67 days

We then talked about why the US was able to set up new things like the machine for the census, when Europe had just kept with people doing the census. One of the reasons is that the US had just gotten out of the civil war and was really far behind Europe, so the US was open to innovation. Another reason was that it would theoretically save time and money. However, for the years it saved the census, they spent it doing even further analysis on it! In the end, they ended up spending twice as much money as the 1880 census!

Images from: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/census-tabulator.html

1997 Comqaq Computer, Chips Challenge, and My Computing History

30 Friday Sep 2011

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My first computer was my grandparent’s 1997 Compaq computer. At home, we didn’t have a computer until later in my childhood, so I would enjoy going over to my grandparent’s house and playing on theirs. I used to sit on my grandma’s lap and play on the computer. It had less than a GB of memory on it. My grandparents enjoy telling the story of when they bought it. The salesman told them that there was more memory on the machine than they would ever use in their lifetime. Such an underestimate of the growth of technology! The computer had Windows 1995, and I found it really sad when Windows XP came out, since none of my old games were compatible with it.

My favorite game to play was Chip’s Challenge. I played it through the majority of my childhood, coming back to it periodically. I never beat the game, but I got around half way through it. When my grandparents got another computer my grandma and I used to play Chip’s Challenge at the same time on separate computers.  Another favorite game of mine was The Oregon Trail. The computers at my grade school had it installed on them and I used to get to school early so that I could play it. I would name people after my friends or people who I didn’t like (and then subsequently ford many rivers).

Computing technology had a large role in staying with my major, Nuclear Engineering. During my sophomore year of college, I took a radiation detection class. In this class, we learned about different technology that can detect radiation. A detector basically works using knowledge of principal radiation interactions with matter to measure this radiation, through a pulse of current through a wire. The characteristics of this current pulse are used to tell different information about the incoming radiation.

During the class, we learned about the different electronics in the detector and how the data is interpreted to come up with an output. We had a lab in which we actually worked with detectors. In the lab, we used more complicated detectors, which were hooked up to a NIM-BIN that holds the multi-channel analyzer, signal splitter, amplifier, etc. I found how detectors worked and how radiation was measured fascinating. It encouraged me to stay in Nuclear Engineering and shaped what I want to work on later in life.

Image Locations (in order of their appearance):

 

 

 

Class Summary 9/26: Computing and History We Care About

26 Monday Sep 2011

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On Monday, we went over the course syllabus and began to talk about computing. In the syllabus, we highlighted the objectives, schedule, assignments, and grading. Specifics readings are listed on the course website and should be completed before the due date, as these are essential to the class discussion. In addition, to readings there are specific assignments. These should be submitted electronically before the class in which they are due as a pdf via email to the instructor, Kiri Wagstaff. If anyone has trouble creating or cannot create a pdf, please let the instructor know. It is also recommended to post them to the class website so that everyone can see your ideas and viewpoint, but this is not required. The first assignment is due October 3rd. If you happen to lose your schedule, it is downloadable on the Syllabus and Schedule page.

After discussing the syllabus, we discussed computers that we encounter on a regular basis. Examples included GPS, video gaming consoles, cell phones, calculators, laptops, desktops, lights, slide rule, abacus, etc. From this stemmed the question of what differentiates a computer and a calculator. An explanation given in class consisted of the following:

  • A computer can store programs. These programs can be brought up later and accessed.
  • A calculator has to be told each time to do a computation. It doesn’t store programs and instead has to be accessed each time.

However, during class it was noted that this is a very simple explanation and it will be covered more in depth later.

A little video was shown in class, which briefly covered the History of Computers: Computer History in 90 Seconds.

photo credit: http://711tech.com/?p=23

Also the abacus and napier’s rod were discussed. The abacus is a calculating tool that consists of two sections of rows of beads. In the top row, the beads represent the number 5, whereas the bottom represents the number 1.  Those that touch the middle bar are counted. If mastered, the abacus can greatly help in calculations. As seen in a video of Chinese school children using the abacus: Amazing Abacus Math Video.

Some background for napier’s rod was talked about during class, such as the logarithmic tables. For which numbers were converted to exponentials. This would make multiplication and division easier, since the exponents would just need to be added or subtracted.