Halley's Comet Returns on Schedule

1758

On Christmas night a German farmer-astronomer named Palitzsch turned his telescope east and saw, exactly where Halley had predicted, the returning comet. Halley had been dead sixteen years; his prediction - made from Newton's laws - had been verified by the cosmos itself. Celestial mechanics had become prophecy. The French mathematician Clairaut had refined the predicted date by accounting for Jupiter and Saturn's gravitational pull.