Classical Gravitational Period After Newton
The main aim of Newton's successors, from Leonhard Euler, Alexis Clairaut and Jean d'Alembert in the mid-eighteenth century, down to E W Brown in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, was to account completely and much more precisely for the moon's motions on the basis of Newton's laws, i.e. the laws of motion and of universal gravitation by attractions inversely proportional to the squares of the distances between the attracting bodies. They also wished to put the inverse-square law of gravitation to the test, and for a time in the 1740s it was seriously doubted, on account of what was then thought to be a large discrepancy between the Newton-theoretical and the observed rates in the motion of the lunar apogee. However Clairaut showed shortly afterwards (1749–50) that at least the major cause of the discrepancy lay not in the lunar theory based on Newton's laws, but in excessive approximations that he and others had relied on to evaluate it.
Most of the improvements in theory after Newton were made in algebraic form: they involved voluminous and highly laborious amounts of infinitesimal calculus and trigonometry. It also remained necessary, for completing the theories of this period, to refer to observational measurements.
Read more about this topic: Lunar Theory
Famous quotes containing the words classical, period and/or newton:
“Et in Arcadia ego.
[I too am in Arcadia.]”
—Anonymous, Anonymous.
Tomb inscription, appearing in classical paintings by Guercino and Poussin, among others. The words probably mean that even the most ideal earthly lives are mortal. Arcadia, a mountainous region in the central Peloponnese, Greece, was the rustic abode of Pan, depicted in literature and art as a land of innocence and ease, and was the title of Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance (1590)
“There is a period near the beginning of every man’s life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)