by E. T. Bell
Laplace now threw himself into his life work—the detailed application of the Newtonian law of gravitation to the entire solar system. If he had done nothing else he would have been greater than he was. The kind of man Laplace would have liked to be is described in a letter of 1777, when he was twenty seven, to D’Alembert. The picture Laplace gives of himself is one of the strangest mixtures of fact and fancy a man ever perpetrated in the way of self-analysis.
“I have always cultivated mathematics by taste rather than from the desire for a vain reputation,” he declares. “My greatest amusement is to study the march of the inventors, to see their genius at grips with the obstacles they have encountered and overcome. I then put myself in their place and ask myself how I should have gone about surmounting these same obstacles, and although this substitution in the great majority of instances has only been humiliating to my self-love, nevertheless the pleasure of rejoicing in their success has amply repaid me for this little humiliation. If I am fortunate enough to add something to their works, I attribute all the merit to their first efforts, well persuaded that in my position they would have gone much farther than I. . . . ”
He may be granted the first sentence. But what about the rest of his smug little essay which might have been handed in by a priggish youngster of ten to his gullible Sunday-school teacher? Notice particularly the generous attribution of his own “modest” successes to the preliminary work of his predecessors. Nothing could be farther from the truth than this frank avowal of indebtedness. To call a spade a spade, Laplace stole outrageously, right and left, wherever he could lay his hands on anything of his contemporaries and predecessors which he could use. From Lagrange, for example, he lifted the fundamental concept of the potential (to be described presently); from Legendre he took whatever he needed in the way of analysis; and finally, in his masterpiece, the Mécanique céleste, he deliberately omits references to the work of others incorporated in his own, with the intention of leaving posterity to infer that he alone created the mathematical theory of the heavens. Newton, of course, he cannot avoid mentioning repeatedly. Laplace need not have been so ungenerous. His own colossal contributions to the dynamics of the solar system easily overshadow the works of others whom he ignores.
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The complications and difficulties of the problem Laplace attacked cannot be conveyed to anyone who has never seen anything similar attempted. In discussing Lagrange we mentioned the problem of three bodies. What Laplace undertook was similar, but on a grander scale. He had to work out from the Newtonian law the combined effects of the perturbations—cross-pulling and hauling—of all the members of the Sun’s family of planets on one another and on the Sun. Would Saturn, in spite of an apparently steady decrease of his mean motion, wander off into space, or would he continue as a member of the Sun’s family? Or would the accelerations of Jupiter and the Moon ultimately cause one to fall into the Sun and the other to smash down on the Earth? Were the effects of these perturbations cumulative and dissipative, or were they periodic and conservative? These and similar riddles were details of the grand problem: is the solar system stable or is it unstable? It is assumed that the Newtonian law of gravitation is indeed universal and the only one controlling the motions of the planets.
Laplace’s first important step toward the general problem was taken in 1773, when he was twenty four, in which he proved that the mean distances of the planets from the Sun are invariable to within certain slight periodic variations.
When Laplace attacked the problem of stability expert opinion was at best neutral. Newton himself believed that divine intervention might be necessary from time to time to put the solar system back in order and prevent it from destruction or dissolution. Others, like Euler, impressed by the difficulties of the lunar theory (motion of the Moon), rather doubted whether the motions of the planets and their satellites could be accounted for on the Newtonian hypothesis. The forces involved were too numerous, and their mutual interactions too complicated, for any reasonably fair guess. Until Laplace proved the stability of the solar system one man’s guess was as good as another’s.
To dispose here of an objection which the reader doubtless has already raised, it may be stated that Laplace’s solution of the problem of stability is good only for the highly idealized solar system which Newton and he imagined. Tidal friction (acting like a brake on diurnal rotation) among other things was ignored. Since the Mécanique céleste was published we have learned a great deal about the solar system and everything in it of which Laplace was ignorant. It is probably not too radical to say that the problem of stability for the actual solar system—as opposed to Laplace’s ideal—is still open. However, the experts on celestial mechanics might disagree, and a competent opinion can be obtained only from them.
As a matter of temperament some find the Laplacian conception of an eternally stable solar system repeating the complicated cycle of its motions time after time for ever and ever as depressing as an endless nightmare. For these there is the recent comfort that the Sun will probably explode some day as a nova. Then stability will cease to trouble us, for we shall all quite suddenly become perfect gases.
For this brilliant start Laplace was rewarded with the first substantial honor of his career when he was barely twenty four, associate membership in the Academy of Sciences. His subsequent scientific life is summarized by Fourier: “Laplace gave to all his works a fixed direction from which he never deviated; the imperturbable constancy of his views was always the principal feature of his genius. He was already £when he began his attack on the solar system] at the extreme of mathematical analysis, knowing all that is most ingenious in this, and no one was more competent than he to extend its domain. He had solved a capital problem of astronomy [that communicated to the Academy in 1773], and he decided to devote all his talents to mathematical astronomy, which he was destined to perfect. He meditated profoundly on his great project and passed his whole life perfecting it with a perseverance unique in the history of science. The vastness of the subject flattered the just pride of his genius. He undertook to compose the Almagest of his age—the Mécanique céleste; and his immortal work carries him as far beyond that of Ptolemy as the analytical science [mathematical analysis] of the moderns surpasses the Elements of Euclid.”
This is no more than just. Whatever Laplace did in mathematics was designed as an aid to the solution of the grand problem. Laplace is the great example of the wisdom—for a man of genius—of directing all of one’s efforts to a single central objective worthy of the best that a man has in him. Occasionally Laplace was tempted to turn aside, but not for long. Once he was strongly attracted by the theory of numbers, but quickly abandoned it on realizing that its puzzles were likely to cost him more time than he could spare from the solar system. Even his epochal work in the theory of probabilities, although at first sight off the main road of his interests, was inspired by his need for it in mathematical astronomy. Once well into the theory he saw that it is indispensable in all exact science and felt justified in developing it to the limit of his powers.
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The Mécanique céleste, which bound all Laplace’s astronomical work into a reasoned whole, was published in parts over a period of twenty six years. Two volumes appeared in 1799, dealing with the motions of the planets, their shapes (as rotating bodies), and the tides; two further volumes in 1802 and 1805 continued the investigation, which was finally completed in the fifth volume, 1823-25. The mathematical exposition is extremely concise and occasionally awkward. Laplace was interested in results, not in how he got them. To avoid condensing a complicated mathematical argument to a brief, intelligible form he frequently omits everything but the conclusion, with the optimistic remark “Il est aisé à voir” (It is easy to see). He himself would often be unable to restore the reasoning by which he had “seen” these easy things without hours—sometimes days—of hard labor. Even gifted readers soon acquired the habit of groaning whenever the famous phrase appeared, knowing that
as likely as not they were in for a week’s blind work.
A more readable account of the main results of the Mécanique céleste appeared in 1796, the classic Exposition du système du monde (Exposition of the System of the World), which has been described as Laplace’s masterpiece with all the mathematics left out. In this work, as in the long nonmathematical introduction (153 quarto pages) to the treatise on probabilities (third edition, 1820), Laplace revealed himself as almost as great a writer as he was a mathematician. Anyone wishing to glimpse the scope and fascination of the theory of probability, without being held up by technicalities intelligible only to mathematicians, could not do better than to read Laplace’s introduction. Much has been done since Laplace wrote, especially in recent years and particularly in the foundations of the theory of probability, but his exposition is still classic and a perfect expression of at least one philosophy of the whole subject. The theory, it need scarcely be said, is not yet complete. Indeed it is beginning to seem as if it has not yet been begun—the next generation may have it all to do over again.
One interesting detail of Laplace’s astronomical work may be mentioned in passing, the famous nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system. Apparently unaware that Kant had anticipated him, Laplace (only half seriously) proposed the hypothesis in a note. His mathematics was inadequate for a systematic attack, and it was not till Jeans in the present century resumed the discussion that it had any scientific meaning.
Lagrange and Laplace, the two leading French men of science of the eighteenth century, offer an interesting contrast, and one typical of a difference which was to become increasingly sharp with the expansion of mathematics: Laplace belongs to the tribe of mathematical physicists, Lagrange to that of pure mathematicians. Poisson, himself a mathematical physicist, seems to favor Laplace as the more desirable type:
“There is a profound difference between Lagrange and Laplace in all their work, whether in a study of numbers or the libration of the Moon. Lagrange often appeared to see in the questions he treated only mathematics, of which the questions were the occasion—hence the high value he put upon elegance and generality. Laplace saw in mathematics principally a tool, which he modified ingeniously to fit every special problem as it arose. One was a great mathematician; the other a great philosopher who sought to know nature by making higher mathematics serve it.”
Fourier (whom we shall consider later) was also struck by the radical difference between Lagrange and Laplace. Himself rather narrowly “practical” in his mathematical outlook, Fourier was yet capable—at one time—of estimating Lagrange at his true worth:
“Lagrange was no less a philosopher than he was a great mathematician. By his whole life he proved, in the moderation of his desires, his immovable attachment to the general interests of humanity, by the noble simplicity of his manners and the elevation of his character, and finally by the accuracy and the depth of his scientific works.”
Coming from Fourier this statement is remarkable. It may smack of the bland rhetoric we are accustomed to expect in French funeral orations, yet it is true, at least today. Lagrange’s great influence on modern mathematics is due to “the depth and accuracy of his scientific works,” qualities which are sometimes absent from Laplace’s masterpieces.
To the majority of his contemporaries and immediate followers Laplace ranked higher than Lagrange. This was due partly to the magnitude of the problem Laplace attacked—the grandiose project of demonstrating that the solar system is a gigantic perpetual motion machine. A sublime project in itself, no doubt, but essentially illusory: not enough about the actual physical universe was known in Laplace’s day—or even in our own—to give the problem any real significance, and it will probably be many years before mathematics is sufficiently advanced to handle the complicated mass of data we now have. Mathematical astronomers will doubtless continue to play with idealized models of “the universe,” or even of the infinitely less impressive solar system, and will continue to flood us with inspiring or depressing bulletins regarding the destiny of mankind; but in the end the by-products of their investigations—the perfection of the purely mathematical tools they have devised—will be their fairly permanent contribution to the advancement of science (as opposed to the propagation of guessing), precisely as has happened in the case of Laplace.
If the foregoing seems too strong, consider what has happened to the Mécanique céleste. Does anyone but an academic mathematician really believe today that Laplace’s conclusions about the stability of the solar system are a reliable verdict on the infinitely complicated situation which Laplace replaced by an idealized dream? Possibly many do; but no worker in mathematical physics doubts the power and utility of the mathematical methods developed by Laplace to attack his ideal.
To take but one instance, the theory of the potential is more significant today than Laplace ever dreamed it would become. Without the mathematics of this theory we should be halted almost at the beginning of our attempt to understand electromagnetism. Out of this theory grew one vigorous branch of the mathematics of boundary-value problems, today of greater significance for physical science than the whole Newtonian theory of gravitation. The concept of the potential was a mathematical inspiration of the first order—it made possible an attack on physical problems which otherwise would have been unapproachable.
The potential is merely the function u described in connection with fluid motion and Laplace’s equation in the chapter on Newton. The function u is there a “velocity potential”; if it is a question of the force of Newtonian gravitational attraction, u is a “gravitational potential.” The introduction of the potential into the theories of fluid motion, gravitation, electromagnetism, and elsewhere was one of the longest strides ever taken in mathematical physics. It had the effect of replacing partial differential equations in two or three unknowns by equations in one unknown.
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In 1785, at the age of thirty six, Laplace was promoted to full membership in the Academy. Important as this honor was in the career of a man of science, the year 1785 stands out as a landmark of yet greater significance in Laplace’s career as a public character. For in that year Laplace had the unique distinction of examining a singular candidate of sixteen at the Military School. This youth was destined to upset Laplace’s plans and deflect him from his avowed devotion to mathematics into the muddy waters of politics. The young man’s name was Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821).
Laplace rode through the Revolution on horseback, as it were, and saw everything in comparative safety. But no man of his prominence and restless ambition could escape danger entirely. If De Pastoret knew what he was talking about in his eulogy, both Lagrange and Laplace escaped the guillotine only because they were requisitioned to calculate trajectories for the artillery and to help in directing the manufacture of saltpetre for gunpowder. Neither was forced to eat grass as some less necessary savants were driven to do, nor was either so careless as to betray himself, as their unfortunate friend Condorcet did, by ordering an aristocrat’s omelet. Not knowing how many eggs go into a normal omelet Cordorcet ordered a dozen. The good cook asked Condorcet his trade. “Carpenter.”—“Let me see your hands. You’re no carpenter.” That was the end of Laplace’s close friend Condorcet. They either poisoned him in prison or let him commit suicide.
After the Revolution Laplace went in heavily for politics, possibly in the hope of beating Newton’s record. The French refer politely to Laplace’s “versatility” as a politician. This is too modest. Laplace’s alleged defects as a politician are his true greatness in the slippery game. He has been criticized for his inability to hold public office under successive regimes without changing his politics. It would seem that a man who is sharp enough to convince opposing parties that he is a loyal supporter of whichever one happens to be in power at the moment is a politician of no mean order. It was his patrons who played the game like amateurs, not Laplace. What would we think of a Republican Postmaster General who gave all the fattest
jobs to undeserving Democrats? Or the other way about? Laplace got a better job every time the government flopped. It cost him nothing to switch overnight from rabid republicanism to ardent royalism.
Napoleon shoved everything Laplace’s way, including the portfolio of the interior—about which more later. All the Napoleonic orders of any note adorned the versatile mathematician’s chest—including the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor and the Order of the Reunion, and he was made a Count of the Empire. Yet what did he do when Napoleon fell? Signed the decree which banished his benefactor.
After the restoration Laplace had no difficulty in transferring his loyalty to Louis XVIII, especially as he now sat in the Chamber of Peers as the Marquis de Laplace. Louis recognized his supporter’s merits and in 1816 appointed Laplace president of the committee to reorganize the École Polytechnique.
Perhaps the most perfect expressions of Laplace’s political genius are those to be found in his scientific writings. It takes real genius to doctor science according to fluctuating political opinion and get away with it. The first edition of the Exposition du système du monde, dedicated to the Council of Five Hundred, closes with these noble words: “The greatest benefit of the astronomical sciences is to have dissipated errors born of ignorance of our true relations with nature, errors all the more fatal since the social order must rest solely on these relations. Truth and justice are its immutable bases. Far from us be the dangerous maxim that it may sometimes be useful to deceive or to enslave men the better to insure their happiness! Fatal experiences have proved in all ages that these sacred laws are never infringed with impunity.” In 1824 this is suppressed and the Marquis de Laplace substitutes: “Let us conserve with care and increase the store of this advanced knowledge, the delight of thinking beings. It has rendered important services to navigation and geography; but its greatest benefit is to have dissipated the fears produced by celestial phenomena and to have destroyed the errors born of ignorance of our true relations with nature, errors which will soon reappear if the torch of the sciences is extinguished.” In loftiness of sentiment there is but little to choose between these two sublime maxima.
