The 18th-century battle over lunar motion

nals, the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 became the first manmade object to reach the Moon. The intentional crash landing of the spacecraft on 13 September 1959 once again demonstrated Soviet technological superiority over the US. That event can be regarded as the trigger of the so-called race to the Moon, initiated by President John F. Kennedy in May 1961. As the much-broadcast commemoration of Apollo 11 and the first manned landing on the Moon reminded us, the Americans won the competition. Every story has a prologue. The one preceding Neil Armstrong’s historic steps shows that a captivating plot from the past needn’t include a cold war or spies. It tells of three men who competed to develop a predictive theory that would accurately describe the motion of the Moon and therefore furnish a key tool that, much later, would help the Soviets and the Americans anticipate the position of their celestial target. The mid-18th-century controversy concerning lunar theory involved strong personal and political interests and shows that even in mathematics, truth isn’t always the result of a solely objective and logical demonstration but can be a construct born of tactics, strategy, and intrigue.