Rudolf Wolf
Tucked in the footnotes to the Wolff and Patrone paper is a curious reference to an ‘Extract of a letter to Mr. Carrington.’ from none other than Rudolf Wolf (1816-1893), the famous solar observer and creator/curator of the best and most complete sunspot time series then in existence. The letter extract was printed in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Vol 19 p85.
Wikpedia doesn’t tell us much about Wolf, and it certainly doesn’t mention that he was a solar-planetary theorist!
Leif Svalgaard has never mentioned it either, until I asked.
[Update: to me anyway. Apparently he has told others before]
The Letter is reproduced below the break.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
A very interesting piece of history Tallbloke. I love the politeness of the letter, written, I note, just months before Carrington’s Flare of September that year. I wonder if his formula could be brought up to date and checked?
Now that is interesting, and I thought I had made a discovery…
I should frame it.
Gray, yes, clearly one of nature’s gentlemen. We should all try to follow his example.
Hi guys and happy new year.
Roy, don’t underestimate your own contribution, you have progressed the investigation beyond where Wolf got to by a long way.
Gray, yes, I doubt Carrington wrote back to tell him he was a ‘crank’ or that his ideas were ‘junk’ either. 😉
As it turns out, Leif already knew about Wolf’s interest in planetary theory, and has a copy of Wolf’s longer treatise on the issue (In the original German) here:
Click to access Wolf-VII.pdf
He says:
He returns to this topic several times later, but eventually abandons the whole thing as the various formulae he comes up with eventually all fail. Paul Charbonneau wrote the definitive article on this early work: http://www.leif.org/EOS/Rise-and-Fall.pdf
When I emailed my SSN formula to Dr. Hathaway some 5 years ago, he emailed back copy of that letter. My remark was he didn’t go far enough, stopped at Jupiter, if he went a step further to Saturn, he would have cracked it.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NFC7.htm
Heh, nice one Vuk.
I just read the Paul Charbonneau piece linked above, very enjoyable.
Paul Charbonneau’s review is a useful and good read. I read it some years ago on advice of Dr. Eric Priest (RS) and one of the few prominent solar scientists laureates of the Hale’s prize ( 2002 ).
Remarkable “revelation”(apocalypse)!
I do not buy chapter 6 in the “Rise and Fall”. The existence of the Hale cycle is the best proof of planetary influence. If one was thinking within an electromagnetic paradigm rather than gravitational, it is what would be expected form the alternating syzygies of J, E and V :-
1) JEV* / J*EV at even numbered cycle maximums, and 2) JE*V / JV*E in odd numbered cycle maximums.
Ulric Lyon dice:
10 de enero 2011 a las 12:57
Gravity was invited to the partu too… 🙂
An interesting new planetary theorizing clip.
K. Margiani says:
January 10, 2011 at 2:22 pm
Hi and welcome. This thread may interest you:
Oliver has a lot to say about neutrons. I’m surprised you haven’t run across him on the net yet. 🙂
Intersting development of his idea is prven here: “Science” as should be be done.
First the observations.
Then the math and the equations that describe the observation.
(With notes about details and if-then clauses and “maybes” in the mathematical simplification of the observations.)
And only “then” the theory about WHY the math can describes the observations is attempted..
I would expect Wolf made the conjecture first, then tested the equations of planetary motion against observation. Going back to Vuk’s comment, he did include Saturn didn’t he?
Oliver is my teacher and friend. He has known on clip.
Be well tallbloke!
Leif says:
TB says:“Soon abandoned” after several orbits of Jupiter. How many years before his death did he “abandon” it? Please present your evidence.
This can be turned around. What is your evidence that it was not ‘soon’? Perhaps I should have said ‘he later abandoned the idea’ to forestall silly debate over when [I shall not object if you substitute ‘soon’ by ‘later’ on your website, but you should show the maturity to change the text to what I otherwise suggested]. Wolf clearly did struggle over the years with the problem, never finding a good correlation when new data became available. It is clear that his initial optimism didn’t stay with him. His real discovery of the relationship between the variation of the compass needle and sunspots held up and he every year [when he published the sunspot numbers] never failed to point out that the relationship still held. He never [after his initial announcement] again mentioned his planetary formula [which he would have if the agreement persisted – as he did with the magnetic needle], except finally admitting in 1893 that it didn’t really work to his satisfaction.
Wolf died in 1893! A deathbed recantation it seems. 🙂
[…] despite investigation by many scientists ranging from William Herschel in the early C18th, Rudolf Wolff in the C19th, to Paul D Hosé in the later […]