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The Hunt for Vulcan: . . . And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe Hardcover – November 3, 2015
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For more than fifty years, the world’s top scientists searched for the “missing” planet Vulcan, whose existence was mandated by Isaac Newton’s theories of gravity. Countless hours were spent on the hunt for the elusive orb, and some of the era’s most skilled astronomers even claimed to have found it.
There was just one problem: It was never there.
In The Hunt for Vulcan, Thomas Levenson follows the visionary scientists who inhabit the story of the phantom planet, starting with Isaac Newton, who in 1687 provided an explanation for all matter in motion throughout the universe, leading to Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier, who almost two centuries later built on Newton’s theories and discovered Neptune, becoming the most famous scientist in the world. Le Verrier attempted to surpass that triumph by predicting the existence of yet another planet in our solar system, Vulcan.
It took Albert Einstein to discern that the mystery of the missing planet was a problem not of measurements or math but of Newton’s theory of gravity itself. Einstein’s general theory of relativity proved that Vulcan did not and could not exist, and that the search for it had merely been a quirk of operating under the wrong set of assumptions about the universe. Levenson tells the previously untold tale of how the “discovery” of Vulcan in the nineteenth century set the stage for Einstein’s monumental breakthrough, the greatest individual intellectual achievement of the twentieth century.
A dramatic human story of an epic quest, The Hunt for Vulcan offers insight into how science really advances (as opposed to the way we’re taught about it in school) and how the best work of the greatest scientists reveals an artist’s sensibility. Opening a new window onto our world, Levenson illuminates some of our most iconic ideas as he recounts one of the strangest episodes in the history of science.
Praise for The Hunt for Vulcan
“Delightful . . . a charming tale about an all-but-forgotten episode in science history.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Engaging . . . At heart, this is a story about how science advances, one insight at a time. But the immediacy, almost romance, of Levenson’s writing makes it almost novelistic.”—The Washington Post
“Captures the drama of the tireless search for this celestial object.”—Science
“A well-structured, fast-paced example of exemplary science writing.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A short, beautifully produced book that tells a cautionary tale . . . Levenson is a breezy writer who renders complex ideas in down-to-earth language.”—The Boston Globe
“An inspiring tale about the quest for discovery.”—Walter Isaacson
“Equal to the best science writing I’ve read anywhere, by any author. Beautifully composed, rich in historical context, deeply researched, it is, above all, great storytelling.”—Alan Lightman, author of The Accidental Universe
“Levenson tells us where Vulcan came from, how it vanished, and why its spirit lurks today. Along the way, we learn more than a bit of just how science works—when it succeeds as well as when it fails.”—Neil deGrasse Tyson
“Science writing at its best. This book is not just learned, passionate, and witty—it is profoundly wise.”—Junot Díaz
- Print length256 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateNovember 3, 2015
- Dimensions5 x 0.9 x 7.6 inches
- ISBN-100812998987
- ISBN-13978-0812998986
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Engaging . . . At heart, this is a story about how science advances, one insight at a time. But the immediacy, almost romance, of [Thomas] Levenson’s writing makes it almost novelistic.”—The Washington Post
“Captures the drama of the tireless search for this celestial object.”—Science
“Levenson’s narrative is a well-structured, fast-paced example of exemplary science writing. A scintillating popular account of the interplay between mathematical physics and astronomical observations.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The Hunt for Vulcan is a short, beautifully produced book that tells a cautionary tale. . . . Levenson is a breezy writer who renders complex ideas in down-to-earth language . . . and colorfully illustrates the limits of scientific theory as it faces new data and even more persuasive theories.”—The Boston Globe
“Thomas Levenson wonderfully tells the story of Vulcan. . . . Looping through science history from Isaac Newton onwards, Levenson elegantly reveals the evolutionary nature of scientific thought, and the marvel of the revolution that Einstein wrought.”—Nature
“An essential read . . . a compelling story that successfully portrays how science deals with ambiguity . . . The Hunt for Vulcan succeeds spectacularly at displaying the intricate, confusing, and sometimes quirky way science progresses.”—Ars Technica
“This delightful and enlightening drama tells the story of the hunt for a planet that did not exist and how Einstein resolved the mystery with the most beautiful theory in the history of science. The Hunt for Vulcan is an inspiring tale about the quest for discovery and the challenges and joys of understanding our universe.”—Walter Isaacson
“The Hunt for Vulcan is equal to the best science writing I’ve read anywhere, by any author. Beautifully composed, rich in historical context, deeply researched, it is, above all, great storytelling. Levenson gives a true picture of the scientific enterprise, with all its good and bad guesses, wishful thinking, passion, human ego, and desire to know and understand this strange and magnificent cosmos we find ourselves in.”—Alan Lightman, author of The Accidental Universe
“The forgotten story of Vulcan could no longer remain untold. Tom Levenson tells us where it came from, how it vanished, and why its spirit lurks today. Along the way, we learn more than a bit of just how science works—when it succeeds as well as when it fails.”—Neil deGrasse Tyson
“Thomas Levenson’s brilliance as a writer is in setting the evolution of scientific ideas into their appropriate historical contexts, allowing us to see their wider implications. In this engaging, informative book, laced with lovely anecdotes, Levenson elegantly teaches us about both the laws of physics and the less law-abiding ways in which physics advances occur.”—Lisa Randall, professor of physics, Harvard University, and author of Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs
“The Hunt for Vulcan is science writing at its best. As Levenson unravels the history, the drama, and, yes, the physics behind the now-forgotten Vulcan, he also shows how science actually advances in our world and, in the process, reveals how none of our endeavors—even our most empirical—are immune to our penchant for self-deception. This book is not just learned, passionate, and witty—it is profoundly wise.”—Junot Díaz
“Thomas Levenson tells the tale of Newton, Einstein, and the missing planet Vulcan with verve, showing how observations and calculations clashed in a battle that decided the fate of the universe.”—Sean Carroll, author of The Particle at the End of the Universe
“Scorched and blackened by the fires of the Sun, Vulcan is the innermost planet that never was. Thomas Levenson illuminates the untold story of a world concocted to explain a planetary anomaly whose existence heralded a shocking new picture of space and time. Packed with colorful anecdotes, this is a vivid, well-paced, thoroughly enjoyable tale of human delusion and ultimate scientific triumph.”—Marcus Chown, author of Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You
“Levenson deftly draws readers into a quest that shows how scientists think and argue, as well as how science advances: one discovery at a time.”—Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
“The Immovable Order of the World”
August 1684, Cambridge.
Edmond Halley had suffered a sad and vexing spring. In March, his father disappeared under suspicious circumstances—a not-altogether-unusual fate in the political turmoil that shot through the last years of the Stuart dynasty’s rule. He was found dead five weeks later. He’d left no will, which forced the younger Halley to spend the next few months dealing with the resulting mess: the twelve pounds owed to his father by a local rector; the three pounds a year promised as an annuity to a woman as part of a real estate transaction; rents to collect and trustees to satisfy. That miserable business consumed him into the summer, and ultimately required a trip to Cambridgeshire to handle face to face those details that couldn’t be resolved from London.1
There was nothing happy about the first part of that journey, but once he’d dealt with the legal issues, one unexpected pleasure came his way. In January, before his troubles began, Halley had produced a clever bit of celestial analysis, a calculation that suggested that whatever force held the planets on their paths around the sun grew weaker in proportion to the square of each object’s distance from the sun. But that prompted an immediate question: could that particular mathematical relationship—called an inverse square law—explain why all celestial objects moved down the paths they’d been observed to follow?
The best minds in Europe knew what was at stake in that seemingly technical issue. This was the decisive climax in what we’ve come to call the Scientific Revolution, the long struggle through which mathematics supplanted Latin as the language of science. On the 14th of January, 1684, following a meeting of the Royal Society, Halley fell into conversation with two old friends: the polymath Robert Hooke and the former president of the Society, Sir Christopher Wren. As their talk moved on to astronomy, Hooke claimed he’d already worked out the inverse square law that guided the motions of the universe. Wren didn’t believe him, and so offered both Halley and Hooke a prize—a book worth roughly $300 in today’s money—if either of them could present a rigorous account of such a universal law within two months.2 Halley swiftly acknowledged that he couldn’t find his way to such a result, and Hooke, for all his bravado, failed to deliver a written proof by Wren’s deadline.
There the matter stuck until, at last, Halley escaped from the wretchedness of postmortem wrangles with his surviving family. His business had taken him east from London anyway—why not detour to the university at Cambridge, there to gain at least an afternoon’s respite in talk of natural philosophy? Coming into town he made his way to the great gate of the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity. A left onto the college grounds, then right and almost immediately up the stairs would have brought him to the rooms occupied by the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Isaac Newton.
To most of his contemporaries, Newton in the summer of 1684 was something of an enigma. London’s natural philosophers knew him as a man of formidable intelligence, but Halley was among very few who counted him as an acquaintance, much less a friend. The public record of Newton’s work was slim. His reputation rested on a handful of exceptional results, mostly transmitted to the secretary of the Royal Society in the early 1670s, but he was irascible, proud, swift to anger, and agonizingly slow to forgive, and an early dispute with Hooke left him unwilling to risk grubby public wrangling. He kept much of his work secret for the next decade—so much so that, as his biographer Richard Westfall put it, had he died in the spring of 1684, Newton would have been remembered as a very talented and rather odd man, and nothing more.3 But those who made it so far as to be welcome in the rooms on the northeast corner of Trinity’s Great Court would find someone capable of real warmth—and a mind whose power no learned man in Europe could match.
Much later Newton told the story of Halley’s visit that summer day to another friend, and if the old man’s memory wasn’t playing tricks, the two men chatted about this and that for a while. But eventually Halley got down to the question troubling him since January: what about that inverse square relationship? What curve would the planets in their orbits trace, “supposing the force of the attraction towards the sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance to it?”
“An ellipse,” Newton said instantly.
Halley, “struck with amazement and joy,” asked how his friend knew that answer so surely.
“I have calculated it,” Newton recalled telling his companion, and when Halley asked to see his workings, fumbled among his notes. On that day he claimed he couldn’t find them, and promised to dig them up and send the result to Halley in London. Here, Newton almost certainly lied. The calculation was later found in his papers—and, as Newton may have recognized while Halley waited eagerly in his rooms, it contained an error.4
No matter. Newton reworked his sums that fall, and then pressed on. In November, he sent Halley nine pages of dense mathematical reasoning, titled De motu corporum in gyrum—“On the Motion of Bodies in an Orbit.” It proved that what would become known as Newton’s law of gravitation—an inverse square relationship—requires that given certain circumstances, an object in orbit around another must trace out an ellipse, just as the planets of our own solar system were known to do. Newton went further, sketching the beginnings of a general science of motion, a set of laws that could, deployed properly, describe the how, the where, and the when of every bit of matter on the move anywhere—everywhere—in the cosmos.5
The pamphlet was more than Halley had expected when he first goaded Newton into rethinking old thoughts. Once he read it, though, he understood immediately its larger significance: Newton hadn’t just solved a single problem in planetary dynamics. Rather, Halley grasped, his friend had sketched something much greater, a newly rigorous science of motion of potentially universal scope.
Newton too grasped the opportunity before him. He was famously reticent, and he had published almost nothing for more than a decade. But this time he surrendered to Halley’s encouragement, and began to write with the explicit intention of telling the world what he knew. For the next three years he developed a description of nature based on quantitative laws, applying those ideas to a whole range of problems of motion. As he completed each of the first two parts, he forwarded the manuscript to Halley, who took on the heroic double duty of preparing the dense mathematical texts for the printer while continually prodding Newton to get on with it, to deliver what he already knew would be the book of the age. Finally, in 1687, Halley received Newton’s conclusion, the third section of the work, immodestly and accurately titled “On the System of the World.”6
This was the main event, nothing less than Newton’s demonstration that his new science could encompass the universe. He took all the equations, the geometrical demonstrations, all the proofs he’d worked out to describe motion and produced a detailed, mathematically precise account of the behavior of the night sky, beginning with an analysis of the moons of Jupiter. He worked his way through the solar system, eventually returning home, to the surface of the Earth. There he revealed a gloriously elegant result, an account of the way the gravitational tugs of the moon and sun produced the seemingly intractably complex action of the tides, turning the rise and fall of the sea into rigorous, calculable, scientific order.
He could have stopped there. It would have made sense, leading readers to rest at the natural end of one of the greatest stories ever told: an odyssey through the heavens above (those tiny, naked-eye-invisible motes circling Jupiter) to the Earth below, our home, with every vista along the way accounted for by the workings of a handful of simply expressed laws.
There was, however, one more matter Newton chose to address before the last leaves of his manuscript could be released into Halley’s hands. Comets had first brought Halley and Newton together: they had met after both had chased the bright comet of 1682—the one we now know as Halley’s. But in the last months of his work on Principia, a different object held Newton’s attention: the Great Comet of 1680, discovered by the German astronomer and calendar maker Gottfried Kirch.
Kirch’s comet was itself something of a milestone within the scientific revolution. On the night of November 14, 1680, Kirch had begun his regular night’s work looking for something else entirely, mapping stars as part of a long-running observing program. That evening, he pursued his usual sequence: guiding his telescope to the first object of the night, taking notes, tracing the familiar patterns. Then his telescope shifted a little and something new appeared: “a sort of nebulous spot, of an uncommon appearance.”7 He held on the stranger, tracking it long enough to be sure. It was no star. Rather, he’d found a vagabond, a comet—the first to be discovered using that icon of scientific discovery, the telescope.
For Newton the comet of 1680 offered a unique opportunity. He already knew the shapes of the planetary orbits he analyzed with his new mathematical laws—but this previously unknown visitor presented a novel challenge: could his universal gravitation account for motion no one had seen before? He set up his analysis by first plotting the path of Kirch’s comet as revealed in reports from credible observers. He drew a line that connected each observation to reveal its track: a particular kind of curve called a parabola. Parabolas are mathematically kin to the ellipses traced out by the planets and moons Newton had just analyzed. The key difference: ellipses are closed curves; the Earth, the planets, Halley’s comet, NASCAR drivers retrace their path with every trip round their oval courses. Not so any object on a parabolic path. Parabolas are open-ended, following lines that start out there, bend round a focus (the sun, for the comet of 1680), and shoot off again on a course that will never return to the old neighborhood.
Newton made sure every reader really, really understood that yes, the comet of 1680 rode a parabola in and out of the solar system. At the end of a very long and difficult book, he devoted page after page to detailed lists of observations from all those comet hunters who had chased it through the constellations. He left nothing out—it was as if he wanted to cudgel his readers into silent agreement. By the end of his account no one could possibly doubt: the comet of 1680 roared in from who-knew-where, rounded the sun . . . and then vanished into the unmapped vastness beyond, never, apparently, to return.
And then he performed one last feat. He extracted just three observations from his catalogue, three points on the comet’s trajectory, and used his new mathematical model of force and motion to derive the orbit of that comet. He calculated, and the answer came back a perfect match: his results graphed onto that same course all those observers had found: a parabola.8 Strip away the technical complexity—all those conics and curves and calculus masquerading as geometry—and what remained was the triumph, not just Newton’s, but that of a whole new way of grasping the material world.
The account of the comet of 1680 gives his book its true climax. It was cosmic proof that the same laws that governed ordinary experience—the apple’s fall, an arrow’s flight, the moon’s constant path—ruled all experience, to the limits of the universe. A parabola has no end nor beginning: one arm comes from the infinitude of the plane; the other arm shoots off to the same infinity. Placed in the material world, formed by the motion of a comet swinging around the sun, the parabolic motion of the comet of 1680 traces out not just the events that take place in our immediate vicinity, but throughout the universe, from its deepest reaches and back out to them again.
Newton knew exactly what he had done. Near the end of the section on comets, he wrote: “The theory that corresponds exactly to so nonuniform a motion through the greatest part of the heavens, and that observes the same laws as the theory of the planets, and that agrees exactly with exact astronomical observations cannot fail to be true.”9
Edmond Halley agreed. Three years after he’d innocently asked for a single proof, he delivered to the printer the last pages of what Newton again immodestly, again accurately, titled Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica—The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Getting Newton’s enormous manuscript into book form while dealing with its ever-fractious author had left no time for Halley’s own work since 1684, but now, at the finishing line, he granted himself his own victory lap. As Principia went to press, he exercised his editor’s privilege to preface Newton’s prose with a poetic assessment of the great work and its author: “. . . But we are now admitted to the banquets of the gods/We may deal with the laws of heaven above; and we now have/The secret key to unlock the obscure earth; and we know the immovable order of the world/ . . . Join me in singing the praises of Newton, who reveals all this,/Who opens the chest of hidden truth . . .”10
Hidden truths made plain! That was no poetic license. Amid all the talk of gods and heaven, Halley got it right. Newton had promised his readers the system of the world—and this is in fact what they received, a way to investigate matter in motion throughout the cosmos, to the utter limit of space and time. As the great French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange famously said, “Newton was the greatest genius who ever lived, and the most fortunate; for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish.”
Sir Isaac Newton died in 1727. Alexander Pope responded with his famous epigram: “Nature and nature’s ways lay hid in night./God said, ‘Let Newton be,’ and all was light.” By the turn of the next century such apparent hyperbole would seem no more than predictable British understatement.
Product details
- Publisher : Random House; First Edition (November 3, 2015)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0812998987
- ISBN-13 : 978-0812998986
- Item Weight : 10.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5 x 0.9 x 7.6 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,476,528 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #540 in Relativity Physics (Books)
- #2,132 in Astrophysics & Space Science (Books)
- #5,058 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

My day job has me professing science writing at MIT, where I teach in the Institute's Graduate Program in Science Writing.
I continue to do what I did before I joined the professoriat: write books (and the occasional article), and make documentary films about science, its history, and its interaction with the broader culture in which scientific lives and discoveries unfold.
I've written six books. "Money for Nothing" explores the connection between the revolutionary advances in science of th 17th century with the birth of financial capitalism by retelling the story of the first great stock market boom, fraud and crash: the South Sea Bubble of 1720. "The Hunt For Vulcan" tells the story of the planet that wasn't there -- and yet was discovered over and over again. It is both a tale of scientific undiscovery and breakthrough, and an investigation into how advances in science really occur (as opposed to what they tell us in high school). My previous books include "Newton and the Counterfeiter" -- which is a great story from a little-known corner of Isaac Newton's life -- and "Einstein in Berlin," which is, I have reason to hope, on the verge of reissue.
Besides writing, film making and generally being dour about the daily news, I lead an almost entirely conventional life in one of Boston's inner suburbs with a family that gives me great joy.
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This is a very engrossing story bookended by two of the greatest triumphs of the human intellect, Newtonian mechanics and general relativity. The book deals with attempts to square the former with observations (the precession on Mercury's perihelion) that appeared to contradict it. This led to the hypothesizing of an intra-Mercurial planet, Vulcan, to explain them. Despite claims of discovery it became clear that Vulcan did not exist and it was left to Einstein and general relativity to explain the observed precession.
Along the way we are treated to the very human stories of the principals in this saga. Newton, Halley, Laplace, le Verrier, Einstein, and others become real people with real flaws along with enormous talents. I made a number of notes to follow up on a number of points raised which were tangential to the thread of the book.
A few things appear to have changed since I last read of the events covered in this book. Adams seems to no longer be considered the co-discoverer of Neptune. Also, I was under the impression that the alternative names for Uranus (Herschel or Georgium Sidus) were proposals only but apparently they had proponents and persisted for some decades.
The book has an extensive bibliography if the reader wants to pursue any point further. The only issue I had with the book proper was the overindulgence in Einstein's antiwar sentiments. I got the impression that author Levenson was using Einstein to express his own antiwar sentiments.
The Kindle edition was first rate. Especially gratifying was that all the illustrations were high resolution. I am glad that publishers are beginning to recognize that they are not limited in this regard. There are only two equations in the book (the famous mass energy equivalence and the general relativity field equation) but equations in general continue to be an issue on Kindles. They weren't graphics and they weren't text and they continue to be hard to read. Other than that the only quibble is with the sparse progress bars where only book parts are marked, not individual chapters.
This book is highly recommended. The author wove a compelling narrative around a scientific problem and how science and scientists responded. Very well done.
There are some very insightful thoughts about the nature of scientific thought and method presented in a very readable way. I particularly liked the author's treatment of how stories and scientific thinking relate to each other.
Four stars instead of five, because a little too light on the math for my taste, general relativity needing a bit more explanation, and the ending a bit abrupt -- it could have given us a bit more about Einstein's unsuccessful attempts at a unified field theory, which would have added some additional context that I think is a significant part of this story.
From the observations of Copernicus to the math of Newton which brought the new cosmology people studying the heavens with new tools. With Newton’s tools they found new planets. The math wasn’t always 100 % but it made predictions easier. Which meant that Vulcan had to be there, but it wasn’t. Einstein’s math solved the problem and created new ones.
This book is a fantastic read. It is a detective novel that is also a delight
But what will stay with me longest may be something quite different. The story told here was almost exclusively about men. Yet, by using “she” and “her” in his everyday examples, Mr. Levenson lets the girl or young woman reading his book put herself into the story, see herself as a trainspotter or eclipse watcher, as an astronomer or mathematician or theoretical physicist — as a scientist. Well done, and thanks.
The other reviews describe the book pretty well. I will say that I like how the book really helps the reader understand a few key themes about science, such as:
- Individual scientists, and the scientific consensus, sometimes gets stuff wrong. But, eventually (and sometimes it takes awhile), thanks to the scientific method, which takes nothing on faith, the errors get discovered and corrected. Reading about the search for Vulcan did remind me to be more of a skeptic (the real kind).
- Newtonian physics works really well, most of the time. The small (but noticeable) impact of relativistic effects on Mercury's orbit help the reader get a sense for how Newton's physics are usually a really, really good approximation.
- The process of science is hard. This was true even for Einstein, who, after his MVP run in 1905, struggled for years to expand from Special Relativity to General Relativity.
Another interesting observation is that Einstein was indeed a cool guy, in contrast to e.g. La Verrier, who sounds like a total jerk.
Top reviews from other countries
As a child, I was well aware of the anomaly of the miserable 36" arc per century shown by Mercury's orbit. What I only learned as an undergraduate was that the total advance of the perihelion was nearly 600" arc per century. The theory miscalculated by a small anomaly in an already very small correction! This demonstrates the power of Newtonian celestial mechanics.
Levenson is very good in that he shows how, having failed to explain the discrepancy, scientists more of less ignored it for the following 50 years. After all, we all have careers and if the problem was too difficult for earler, very clever, scientists, then there must be more fruitful fields of endeavour for us. The truth will come out eventually.
Not only was it extremely informative, it was written in a very easy to digest format.
Reviewed in India on December 8, 2018
Not only was it extremely informative, it was written in a very easy to digest format.
Newtonian physics upended everyone's understanding of the world and ushered in the age of the scientific revolution. His laws of physics worked so well at explaining the way our universe worked, but with one slight problem - Mercury's orbit wobbled, by just a very tiny, tiny amount and under Newtonian physics that should not happen. You may ask yourself what does it matter if Mercury's orbit is off by a small amount? Well it did matter because it meant either Newton's laws of physics were wrong (which was unthinkable) or something was missing.
One theory that neatly reconciled Mercury's misbehaving orbit with Newtonian physics was that something was missing - there was some other planet or body, yet undetected, whose gravitational force was affecting Mercury's orbit. Thus commenced centuries long search for the mythical planet nicknamed Vulcan.
Levenson does a very good job of tracing and explaining this scientific history, of bringing to life the personalities of the scientists, as well as the amateur astronomers who contributed to the development of physics and astronomy in the hunt for Vulcan. He captures the genuine excitement of scientific discovery. He shows how the theoretical questions that Mercury posed contributed to Einstein's rethinking of Newton's laws and his upending of conventional understanding of physics (at the time) with his Theory of Relativity.
Thoroughly enjoyed it and highly recommend this book, especially for the general interest reader of science and astronomy.





