Atividade 1
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(Unicamp 2002) Leia o texto a seguir e, em seguida, responda à(s) pergunta(s) em português:
The watery planet
THE NEPTUNE FILE: PLANET DETECTIVES AND THE DISCOVERY OF WORLDS UNSEEN
By Tom Standage Walker; 256 pages; $24. Allen Lane, The Penguin Press; 12.99 libras
Like many great stories of scientific accomplishment, the discovery of Neptune combines high intellectual achievement with bitter human controversy. When William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, it doubled the size of the known solar system. Astronomers redrew their maps and calculated the future orbit of the new planet. But Uranus was not easy to predict. The discrepancies could at first be put down to errors in observation, but it gradually became clear that the planet was drifting away from its expected path. Planetary orbits were calculated according to Newton's theory of gravitation. This had proved spectacularly accurate for the other planets, so the wanderings of Uranus presented an uncomfortable problem.
One possible explanation was an undiscovered planet: when it passed close by, the gravitational attraction would pull Uranus away from its predicted orbit. But to find such a planet, astronomers needed either to be very lucky or to know where to look. An English mathematician, John Couch Adams, and a French astronomer, Urbain Jean-Joseph Le Verrier, set out independently to find this planet, using a novel technique. Rather than searching with a telescope, they attempted to determine the unknown planet's position through a mathematical analysis of its effects on the orbit of Uranus. It was an intimidating task (each of them covered thousands of pages with calculations), but they eventually came up with almost identical answers. Neptune was discovered in 1846 with the help of Le Verrier's prediction. But triumph was followed by acrimonious debate over what to name the planet and how to divide the credit. Eventually the affair ended in surprising harmony: Adams and Le Verrier became friends, while variations of the method they pioneered have recently helped to show the existence of planets around other stars. Tom Standage, a science journalist at "The Economist", tells this fascinating story in an entertaining book that deals adeptly with both the astronomical theory and the human passions.
Alexander Scott.
Our policy is to identify the reviewer of any book by or about someone closely connected with "The Economist".
"The Economist", 28/10/2000.
1. Por que o autor da resenha, Alexander Scott, afirma que "Urano não foi fácil de prever"?
2. O que Scott chama de "tarefa intimidante" (intimidating task)? Em que sentido essa tarefa foi inovadora?
3. À descoberta do novo planeta narrada por Tom Standage seguiu-se um conflito. Em que consistiu esse conflito e como ele terminou?
