When Exactly Will the Eclipse Happen?
The answer, I think, is well enough that even though the edge of totality moves at just over 1000 miles per hour it should be possible to predict when it will arrive at a given location to within perhaps a second. And as a demonstration of this, we’ve created a website to let anyone enter their geo location (or address) and then immediately compute when the eclipse will reach them—as well as generate many pages of other information.
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These days it’s easy to find out when the next solar eclipse will be; indeed built right into the Wolfram Language there’s just a function that tells you (in this form the output is the “time of greatest eclipse”)[…]
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I have to say that I consider Newton in a sense very lucky. It could have been that it wouldn’t have been possible to work out anything interesting from his theory without encountering the kind of difficulties he had with the motion of the Moon—because one would always be running into computational irreducibility. But in fact, there was enough computational reducibility and enough that could be computed easily that one could see that the theory was useful in predicting features of the world (and not getting wrong answers, like with the apse of the Moon)—even if there were some parts that might take two centuries to work out, or never be possible at all.
