Astronomers Inventing Planets Based on Circumstantial Evi...

It happened three times in the past that theoretical astronomers invented a new planet on the basis of indirect and circumstantial evidence. The first time was in 1845 when Adams and Leverrier independently deduced the existence of the planet Neptune from the perturbations which it had produced in the motion of Uranus. One year later, Neptune was duly discovered in the predicted region of the sky. The successful prediction of the presence of an unseen planet was one {31} of the great events...

 On the Future of Chemistry

Chemistry is not the preservation hall of old jazz that it sometimes looks like. We cannot know what may happen tomorrow. Someone may oxidize mercury (II), francium (I), or radium (II). A mineral in Nova Scotia may contain an unsaturated quark per 1020 nucleons. (This is still 6000 per gram.) We may pick up an extraterrestrial edition of Chemical Abstracts. The universe may be a 4-dimensional soap bubble in an 11-dimensional space as some supersymmetry theorists argued in May of 1983. Who kno...