_The Hunt for Vulcan_ notes


P. xv: the episode "offers a glympse of how hard it is to make sense of the
natural world, and how difficult it is to unlearn the things we think are so,
but aren't."

P. 45: Newton: "I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason
for these properties of gravity and I do not feign hypotheses."

P. 49: "The heart of the Newtonian revolution lay with the claim that a purely
mathematical argumentwas a sufficient account of events in the physical world."

P. 60: "a new phenomenon does not necessarily demand a new cause to account for
its apearance." Henri Poincaré would put it like this: 'We cannot know all facts
and it is necessary to choose which are worthy of being known.'" "The trick was
to lay claim only to those facts that could 'complete an unfinished harmony, or
. . . make one forsee a great number of other facts."

P. 65: Newton's Law of Gravitation "has acquired such a degree of certainty that
we would not allow it to be altered." Inded, it needed extension, not
modification. It is the low-mass limit of the GR version.

P. 78: "It fit. It had a moral right to be true."

p. 117: "The cosmos could see things differently. . . . When do you
take 'no' for an answer?  There's a conventional response in science
to that question: right away."