Fantastically Wrong: The Legendary Scientist Who Swore Our Planet Is Hollow

Summary

Athansius Kircher's fanciful imagining of Earth's interior from his work Mundus Subterraneus. In fairness, though, he'd never been to the center of the planet before, unlike Brendan Fraser in the 2008 film Journey to the End of an Actor's Career Center of the Earth. Source: Archive.orgKircher hadn’t a lick of data to back up his claims, but Halley sure did. As strange as it seems, his theory was wrong but well-reasoned given the scope of human knowledge at the time, and it often incorporated ideas from Principia, according to Griffin. Halley argued that the variations in Earth’s magnetic field couldn’t be due to some sort of magnetic body wandering around in rock, what with the rather solid nature of rock, so there must be unseen circles spinning around beneath our feet.“The Earth is represented by the outward Circle,” he wrote, “and the three inward Circles are made nearly proportionable to the Magnitudes of the Planets Venus, Mars, and Mercury, all which may be included within this Globe of Earth.” There’s no danger of them ramming into each other, by the way, because like with Saturn’s concentric rings, they’re held in place perfectly well by gravity.Edmond Halley, brilliant scientist and hater of smiles. Image: Wikimedia Because magnetism is a stronger force than gravity, the inside of the shell must be lined with “Magnetical Matter” that keeps the thing from crumbling and caving in on itself. There is the problem, though, of cracks forming in the outer shell, with gravity sucking ocean water and debris toward the center of the Earth. But Halley reckons that “Internal parts of this Bubble of Earth should be replete with such Saline and Vitrolick Particles” that would plug up a leak (he would later on in 1716 attribute a particularly intense bout of aurora borealis to luminous vapors escaping from a crack in the Earth).In a time when science had not yet divested itself of religion, there was the question of why exactly God would arrange things this way. What use ...