Meteors and comets

Meteor crater, Saaremaa, Estonia.

I could more easily believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven.
— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), in 1807.

Many considerations incline me to believe the comet of 1531 observed by Apianus to be the same as that described by Kepler and Longomontanus in 1607 and which I again observed when it returned in 1682. All the elements agree; only the inequality of the periods appears to oppose this conclusion, but this is not so considerable that it cannot be attributed to physical causes. For the motion of the planet Saturn is so disturbed by the others, particularly by Jupiter, that the planet’s period of rotation is uncertain by several whole days. How much more subject to such errors will a comet be, which travels into space about four times further than Saturn, and whose velocity, if it increased ever so little, could change an orbit from elliptic to parabolic.

Also the identity of the two comets is supported by the fact that, in the summer of 1456, a comet was seen travelling retrograde between the Sun and the Earth in the same manner as the others; and though it was observed astronomically by no one, yet I conjecture from its date and course that it was no other than the before-mentioned comet. Whence I would venture confidently to predict its return, namely in the year 1758. And if this occurs, there will be no further cause for doubt that other comets ought to return also.
— Edmond Halley (1656 – 1742), 1705.

As physics has advanced, it has appeared more and more that sight is less misleading than touch as a source of fundamental notions about matter. The apparent simplicity in the collision of two billiard balls is quite illusory. As a matter of fact the two billiard balls never touch at all; what really happens is inconceivably complicated, but it is more analogous to what happens when a comet penetrates the solar system and goes away again than to what common sense supposes to happen.
— Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970), The ABC of Relativity, 1925.

When beggars die, there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
— William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar, II, ii, 30-31.

Sir Francis Stuart had heard Mr Hariot say that he had seen nine Cometes, and had predicted Seaven of them, but did not tell them how. ‘Tis very strange: excogitent Astronomi.
— John Aubrey, of Thomas Hariot (1560 – 1621), Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Penguin Books, 281.

Of all the comets in the sky,
There’s none like comet Halley:
We see it with the naked eye
And periodically.
— Anon

Ye country comets, that portend
No war, nor prince’s funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grasses’ fall.
— Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), The Mower to the Glow-worms

In the first place, a blazing star or comet appeared for several months before the plague, as there did the year after another, a little before the fire. The old women and the phlegmatic hypochondriac part of the other sex, whom I could almost call old women too, remarked (especially afterward, though not till those judgments were over) that those two comets passed directly over the city, and that so very near the houses that it was plain they imported something peculiar to the city alone; that the comet before the pestilence was of a faint, dull, languid colour, and its motion was very heavy, solemn and slow; but that the comet before the fire was bright and sparkling, or, as others said, flaming, and its motion swift and furious …
— Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731) A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722, Everyman edition pp. 21-22.

You will find an index to this blog at the foot of this link. Please be patient: I am pedalling as fast as I can.