Laplace, in his Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, states that “We can consider the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect that at a given instant were to know all the forces that set nature in motion, and all the positions of all the objects of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also sufficiently broad to subject these data to analysis, would encompass in a single formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the smallest atoms; for such an intellect, nothing would be uncertain, and the future, just like the past, would be evident before its eyes” (Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, Laplace). The most spectacular application of this vision would be the discovery of Neptune in 1846, based on careful studies of the perturbations of the motion of Uranus, newly discovered in 1781.
