Name: The Rings of Saturn - Sixty Symbols
Uploaded: 2026-02-15T22:15:37.000Z
Duration: 14 min 20 s
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You're going a little bit outside your area of expertise today.

Basic passive voice

What we got inspired by a show on the BBC, a quiz show called Mastermind, in which the contestants are given two minutes to answer questions on their favorite topic.

Recently, I saw one on planets of the solar system.

So I thought, okay, I'll have a go at that.

I couldn't answer anything, but there was a question that came up, and

when I heard the answer, that was me finished for the show.

I just went online, and I'm just looking.

And the question was in his essay on the stability of the motion of Saturn's rings, published in the 1850s, which scientists demonstrated that the rings could not be solid structures, but

must instead be composed of numerous small particles orbiting the planet independently.

And I'm thinking it's going to be a famous astronomer.

Maxwell of electromagnetism fame, Maxwell of thermodynamics fame.

I'd never thought of Maxwell of astronomy fame.

He's the one person that submitted this essay.

And in that essay, he explains the ring structure of Saturn way before it was known.

Andy explained why it had to be made up of particles and not made up of solids and a solid piece and not made up of a fluid.

The theoretical physicist came up with this prediction that was finally confirmed, well, certainly in the 20th century.

But it's Cassini going up between 2007 and 2017, that actually finally was able to get between the rings and saw all of these particulates that James Clerk Maxwell had predicted must be there.

And actually, there's a nice little story about the Adams Prize as well, that I thought we could just bring it all together.

All right, so Adams is John Adams, not the US president, John Adams.

So in the 1840s, he was busy trying to understand Uranus and the orbit of Uranus around the sun, and

he was noticing that it wasn't fitting quite with the equations that Newton's laws and Kepler's laws.

And he predicted that there needed to be something else there, that something else turned out to be Neptune.

So he told two of his astronomy colleagues about this, but nothing was done.

A few years later, Le Verrier in France did a very similar calculation and came to the same conclusion.

He also predicted there should be another planet, but

he got in touch with a Friend of his, a colleague in the Germany, an astronomer, said, can we go look him?

I think he was called Gallis and said, could you go and find this?

So Adams had predicted it but hadn't published anything, and

Le Verrier had predicted it and it had been published and it had been spotted.

So there was a bit of a tussle as to who should get the credit.

But in Cambridge, they were pretty determined to try and make sure that Adams got some credit.

And so the alumni of Johns College clubbed together, put money in and said, we're going to have a prize.

It will be bestowed by the University of Cambridge and the prize will be given to somebody who writes an essay in either mathematics, astronomy or another area of natural philosophy.

It'll be a biannual thing and the title will be given that the essay has to be about.

Before we move on, professor, to this essay and the prize, the Adams Prize.

Yeah, I'd forgotten that Adams, if I knew, I'd forgotten that Adams was associated with it.

And I had heard of the Adams Prize because I know two prize winners of the Adams Prize.

Two good friends of mine have won the Adams Prize.

So this was 1848, now that the Adams Prize was sort of instigated.

So in 1855, the announcement was made that the next Adams Prize would be on the title of the Rings of Saturn.

People think it's because there had been observations.

I mean, Galileo saw Saturn back in 1610, and

then in 1650, Huygens was able to make out that there were ring structures there.

Then in 1750 or something, Cassini realized that there were a series of rings.

And then closer to the 1850s, it was realized there was like a darker ring near the center of Saturn.

And I think that led to this interest in what are these rings made of?

And, well, there was one submission, of course, it was from James Clark Maxwell.

So you might think, well, he's going to win anyway.

But what was quite remarkable about this submission from James Clerk Maxwell was a.

It's open to all Cambridge alumni, it still is.

But he was busy thinking about electromagnetism, speed of light.

And then he was also applying for jobs in Scotland.

And he actually published the final essay, which is now regarded as, you know, the definitive work from him on it, in 1859.

So he worked on and off this project for quite a while, even after he'd won the prize.

Because he got the prize in the summer of 1857, they awarded him the prize.

People who've heard of Maxwell will know Maxwell's equations.

But he wasn't super famous when he won the prize.

And he was beginning to think about kinetic theory of gases, which fed into actually to some of this work.

But he wasn't anything like the superstar that he did become.

But let me just make one point about the approach he took, which I think makes this even more interesting.

He basically was one of the first to develop a technique called dynamical systems, which is used all the time in mathematics.

And what a dynamical system does is it says, okay, I know what the equilibrium situation should be with the orbits of the planets, for example.