I know that it is the route to madness to try and think too hard about concepts like gravity, it's better just to understand how the physics pioneers predicted certain outcomes perfectly without leaving their desks. I will tell anyone who asks that I am an athiest, that I can't accept religion because I have to test things for myself.....but science can become so complex, you just have to trust that the experts are peer-reviewing everything and arent part of some global conspiracy to undermine the faithful.
I just love this
Neptune was mathematically predicted before it was directly observed. With a prediction by Urbain Le Verrier, telescopic observations confirming the existence of a major planet were made on the night of September 23, 1846, and into the early morning of the 24th,[1] at the Berlin Observatory, by astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle (assisted by Heinrich Louis d'Arrest), working from Le Verrier's calculations. It was a sensational moment of 19th century science and dramatic confirmation of Newtonian gravitational theory. In François Arago's apt phrase, Le Verrier had discovered a planet "with the point of his pen."
In retrospect, after it was discovered it turned out it had been observed many times before, but not recognized, and there were others who made various calculations about its location, which did not lead to its observation. By 1846, the planet Uranus had completed nearly one full orbit since its discovery by William Herschel in 1781, and astronomers had detected a series of irregularities in its path which could not be entirely explained by Newton's law of gravitation. These irregularities could, however, be resolved if the gravity of a farther, unknown planet were disturbing its path around the Sun. In 1845, astronomers Urbain Le Verrier in Paris and John Couch Adams in Cambridge separately began calculations to determine the nature and position of such a planet.
Le Verrier looking through a telescope 160yrs ago sees Uranus "wobble" and so predicts the existence and position of a completely different planet, Neptune. Aren't humans incredible.
