Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies for Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol

Uranus proved to be an unruly planet. It would erratically speed up and then slow down. It refused to cooperate with Newton’s laws of gravity, which accurately predicted motion everywhere from objects here on Earth to the trajectories of planets in space.42 This anomaly led the French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier to speculate about the existence of another planet located beyond Saturn. This planet, Le Verrier surmised, might be tugging at Uranus and, depending on their respective locations, either pulling Uranus forward and speeding it up or pulling it back and slowing it down. Using only math—with just “the point of his pen,” as Le Verrier’s contemporary François Arago put it—Le Verrier found another planet. This new planet, Neptune, was later observed within one degree of where Le Verrier predicted it would be.43 The astonishing match was produced by a set of laws written by Newton nearly 160 years before.

Goddamn!