the credit, and sought to have the new planet named for him. There was some justice in their view, since the program lay much more in the French than in the British mainstream. Certainly the French gave honors and offices to Leverrier, whereas Adams was nearly ignored. "For contemporaries the moral that they order these things better in France was particularly easy to draw" (Knight, 1986, p. 133).
In contrast, the British held the leadership in physics through most of the nineteenth century. We think of physics as a particularly mathematical discipline, but this was not entirely the case through much of the nineteenth century. The basic mathematical treatment of classical physics--the Newtonian synthesis--had already matured by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The great problem in the earlier part of the century was that of thermodynamics--the mechanical behavior of gasses--and it does not permit of a fully elegent mathematical solution; instead, philosophically inelegant statistical methods must be relied upon.
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