John Couch Adams

John Couch Adams was a British mathematician and astronomer. He was born on June 5, 1819, in Laneast, near Launceston, Cornwall, and passed away in Cambridge on January 21, 1892.

Adams is best known for predicting the existence and position of the planet Neptune using only mathematics. He did this to explain unusual movements in the orbit of Uranus. At the same time, another scientist named Urbain Le Verrier was doing similar work without knowing about Adams. Le Verrier shared his findings with an astronomer who then discovered Neptune very close to the spot Le Verrier had predicted.

Adams also helped explain why we have meteor showers, and his ideas are still used today. He taught at the University of Cambridge and received many honors for his work. A crater on the Moon and some parts of space are named after him to remember his important discoveries.

Early life

John Couch Adams was born at Lidcot, a farm at Laneast, near Launceston, Cornwall, the eldest of seven children. His parents were Thomas Adams, a poor tenant farmer, and his wife, Tabitha Knill Grylls. The family were devout Wesleyans who enjoyed music. John was very interested in books about stars and space from a young age.

John went to school in Laneast where he learned some Greek and algebra. At age twelve, he attended a private school in Devonport run by a family friend. There he studied older subjects but mostly taught himself mathematics by reading books. In 1835, he saw Halley's Comet from Landulph and began making his own star calculations. In 1836, his mother inherited some land, and his parents sent him to the University of Cambridge. He graduated in 1843 with top honors.

Discovery of Neptune

Main article: Discovery of Neptune

In 1821, Alexis Bouvard made tables showing where the planet Uranus should be, using Newton's laws of motion. But later observations showed Uranus was moving differently than expected, making Bouvard think another object might be affecting it. John Couch Adams learned about this and believed he could figure out where this hidden object was just by using math and the way gravity works.

Adams worked on this problem for years, even while studying and helping others. In 1845, he shared his ideas with some astronomers but didn't finish explaining everything clearly. Around the same time, another astronomer named Urbain Le Verrier in France also worked on the same problem. Soon after, the planet Neptune was found, and both Adams and Le Verrier were praised for their smart work, even though Le Verrier's work led directly to the planet being spotted first. Adams was happy to share credit and didn’t feel upset about it.

Work style

John Couch Adams had a special way of working. After 1852, he joined Pembroke College, where he stayed for the rest of his life. Even though he became famous for discovering the planet Neptune using math, he also did important work on gravity and Earth's magnetism. He was very good at precise calculations and often improved the work of others.

Adams did not like to compete or share his work until it was perfect. He also found it hard to write letters or remember everyday tasks. Some think these qualities might be linked to what we now understand as Asperger syndrome. In 1852, he created better tables for measuring the Moon's distance, improving earlier work by other scientists. He hoped this would help him get a new job, but another person was chosen instead because Adams was not as strong at organizing and managing work.

Lunar theory – Secular acceleration of the Moon

For a long time, people thought the Moon moved at a steady speed in the sky. But in 1695, Edmond Halley suggested that the Moon was actually moving faster over time. Later, scientists tried to explain why this happened.

John Couch Adams studied this idea in 1853. He found that earlier scientists had missed some important details. Adams showed that small forces, when added up over time, could create big changes in the Moon's motion. After some debate, other scientists agreed with Adams, and his work helped us understand more about how the Moon moves. His important contributions earned him the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1866. We now know that the Moon's changing speed is due to something called tidal acceleration.

Leonids

In November 1866, a big meteor shower drew the attention of John Couch Adams to the Leonids. A scientist named Hubert Anson Newton had already talked about where and when this shower might happen. Adams studied this carefully and found that the Leonids, a group of shooting stars in our Solar System, follow a special path in the sky every 33.25 years. He also learned that big planets like Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus change this path a little. He shared these ideas in 1867. Some think this was his biggest success because his path for the Leonids matched the path of the comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, showing that comets and meteors are closely related.

Later career

Ten years later, George William Hill shared a new and smart way to study the movement of the moon. Adams quickly talked about his own unpublished work on the same topic, which supported and added to Hill’s ideas.

For forty years, Adams worked on figuring out certain numbers in Carl Friedrich Gauss’s theory of terrestrial magnetism. These calculations were very hard and were not published while he was alive. They were put together by his brother, William Grylls Adams, and are in the second volume of his collected Scientific Papers. Doing these kinds of calculations was almost like a hobby for him. He figured out the Euler–Mascheroni constant to 236 decimal places and found the Bernoulli numbers up to the 62nd.

Adams really admired Newton and his work, and many of his papers show Newton’s style of thinking. In 1872, Isaac Newton Wallop, the 5th Earl of Portsmouth, gave his private collection of Newton’s papers to Cambridge University. Adams and G. G. Stokes organized these papers and published a list of them in 1888.

In 1881, he was offered the job of Astronomer Royal, but he chose to keep teaching and researching in Cambridge. He was the British representative at the International Meridian Conference in Washington in 1884. He also went to meetings of the British Association in Montreal and the American Association in Philadelphia.

Honours

In 1847, John Couch Adams was said to have been offered a special honor by Queen Victoria during her visit to Cambridge, but he chose not to accept it. In 1848, he received the Copley medal from the Royal Society and the Adams Prize, a math award started by St John's College. He became a member of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1849, and served as President of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1851 and again in 1874. He was also made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1847.

Family and death

John Couch Adams passed away after a long illness on 21 January 1892 in Cambridge. He was buried close to his home in St Giles Cemetery, now called the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge. In 1863, he married Miss Eliza Bruce from Dublin, and she lived until 1919. She was buried together with him. Adams left behind wealth worth £32,434 at the time, which would be around £2.6 million today.

Memorials

John Couch Adams was honored in several ways after his death. There is a memorial in Westminster Abbey with a portrait medallion made by Albert Bruce-Joy. St John's College, Cambridge also has a bust of him made by Joy, and the Royal Astronomical Society has another youthful bust. There are portraits of Adams by Hubert von Herkomer in Pembroke College and by Paul Raphael Montord in the combination room of St John's.

A memorial tablet with an inscription by Archbishop Benson can be found in Truro Cathedral. A public institute was built in his honor in Launceston, near where he was born. Additionally, a place called Adams Nunatak on Neptune Glacier in Alexander Island, Antarctica, is named after him, as is a statue by Joy in Albert Square, Manchester.

Obituaries

Several newspapers and journals wrote about Adams after his death. The Times published an obituary on January 22, 1892. The Astronomical Journal, the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and The Observatory also had articles remembering his contributions to science.

About Adams and the discovery of Neptune

Many books and articles have been written about Adams and his role in discovering the planet Neptune. These works explore the history and importance of this discovery in astronomy.

By Adams

Adams wrote many scientific papers, and some of his works were collected and published after his death. These include volumes of his scientific papers and lectures on the Lunar Theory. His papers related to the discovery of Neptune were given to St John's College library and later moved to the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Unfortunately, they were stolen during World War II but were recovered in 1998.