The planet Vulcan: a cautionary tale
kevinboone.me
kevinboone.me
In (western) occultism the planets are considered to be more like the hands of a clock. The hands don’t cause the time, they indicate a process going on everywhere. Likewise, the planets show the rhythm of spiritual forces at work throughout the cosmos, including within the human being. So it isn’t that planets beam forces at us, they’re more like a map of forces already built into us. Each planet’s orbit bounds a sphere, and each corresponds to an organ of the body and a phase of life.”
Wp says "The period of revolution was 19 days and 17 hours .. As seen from the Earth, Vulcan's greatest elongation from the Sun was 8 degrees."
So almost once a week, Vulcan would be 8 degrees away from the Sun. For comparison, the Sun and Moon both have an angular diameter of about 0.5 degrees. Another "Mercury-sized planet" should not have escaped notice.
Usually blind analyses are developed with a mixture of simulated data and known "null" data. For example, if you were developing a blind analysis to look for Vulcan in telescope data, you might create an artificial telescope that renders simulated planets and use that to refine and characterize whatever imaging techniques you're using, and also look apply those techniques to data from real telescopes pointed far away from the sun to make sure they're not finding false positives.
In particle physics, a half century ago, before blind analyses were common, there were a lot of particle "discoveries" resulting from seeing some anomaly in the data, then introducing more and more cuts to refine the data until it was a huge statistically significant peak. But then these would disappear as soon as more data appeared, because ultimately what they'd found was statistical noise.
At least some of the evidence for the Higgs boson comes from blind analyses on LHC data.
Sort of like if 19th century scientists would have just observed Mercury's perihelion advance and called it "dark perihelion" without postulating Vulcan or modified Newton or relativity.
It does make one positive claim as a hypothesis: that we don't need to modify our model of gravity, only our model of particle physics.
Whereas MOND, the competing hypothesis, says we need to modify our model of gravity and not our model of particle physics.
Of course, it's also possible that we will end up needing to modify both.
In those terms, the planet Vulcan hypothesis was basically the analogue at the time of dark matter--whereas the eventual solution, General Relativity, was the analogue of MOND.
I was just skimming through a paper by Dyson (the physicist not the inventor) describing some conjectures in the number theory of partitions and he says: I hope these... do not suffer the fate of the planet Vulkan. I guess he meant that they are attractive at first glance but ultimately amount to nothing.
Cannot remember ever coming across Vulkan before this, ever.
This all seems like science and scientists getting the job done, a tale of scientific discovery and triumph, not cautionary.
At this late date I would expect most accounts to be written as if it was obvious all along that "Vulcan" wasn't real. It was announced as discovered at one point, so it was not at all obvious at the time.
Now we have the search for Planet 9, details for both:
Or to use a word from a great movie from ~40 years ago: inconceivable :)