GetsGold

GetsGold t1_j3kjx66 wrote

So you're saying that they estimated comet paths but were off and so hypothesized the existence of other bodies or forces? Is there a quote in the article about that?

That's interesting, but not the same as predicting specific planets, and especially Pluto. Pluto is less than a fifth the mass of our moon and orbiting 30+ times the distance from the Sun as us. They wouldn't have close to the precise data to estimate that.

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GetsGold t1_j3kdztv wrote

They didn't even know about Neptune and almost certainly didn't know about Uranus even though it was technically just barely visible. They weren't making gravitational predictions about Pluto thousands of years ago when we couldn't even do that ourselves a hundred years ago.

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GetsGold t1_j3kcg0m wrote

They didn't have math at that level. You're describing how Neptune was discovered, but that was in the 1800s. It was found due to irregularities in the path of Uranus that would be explained by another planet.

Further discrepancies led to searching for another planet, and that led to finding Pluto. However Pluto was later found to be too small to explain them.

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GetsGold t1_j3kc4mu wrote

He discovered Eris, which was more massive than Pluto.

Ceres was a planet that was discovered between Earth and Mars and Jupiter in 1801. Around 50 years later after several more planets were discovered in that region they started referring to them as asteroids instead.

That's similar to what happened with Pluto. At first it seemed unique in its part of the Solar System, but by the 90's we started discovering many other objects in that region, another belt. So with Eris they decided to treat it like the asteroid belt and stop calling its members planets.

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GetsGold t1_j1yc4cc wrote

Bees could be trained to pick which of two cards had the fewer number of symbols.

Then when shown a card with no symbols, the bees would pick this one more often than should happen randomly, implying that they could figure out "zero" was a number on the number line smaller than any positive number.

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