February 28, 2019 • 53 mins
Pluto may not be a planet, but it definitely exists. Not every case is so clear. The history of near-Earth astronomy contains many cases of bodies that may or may not have ever existed in the solar system we call home. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick take a journey through space to survey once-hypothetical bodies that took work to prove, once-imagined bodies that are now confirmed phantoms, and the unsolved mysteries where questions remain.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Greetings, traveler. Take a seat, strap yourself in pre order
any of the various microgravity snacks and cocktails on our
in flight menu. As we leave Earth's atmosphere, we will
engage the Loco Knot engine, which will allow us to
cross the boundaries between our world and other worlds that
could have been. Instead of visiting the actual planets of
(00:22):
our Solar system, we will visit the various hypothetical Solar
System objects that all seemed possible at one point. Counting
down five four three two one. Welcome to Stuff to
(00:44):
Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
wasn't it stuff to blow your mind? My name is
Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back to
explore some of the furthest reaches of space, about as
far as you can go into space, the part of
space that never existed in the first place, or is,
(01:07):
or in some cases, as we'll get into in an
upcoming episode, things that have not been completely substantiated in
the dark outer regions of our Solar system. Right, So,
today Robert and I wanted to explore hypothetical Solar System objects,
objects believe to be out there in our local galactic
neighborhood within the domain of influence of our home star,
(01:29):
the Sun. Uh. And there have been tons of objects
like this over the years that have been proposed to
be out there, some that we now know aren't actually
there or were never there. Others that maybe there's still
an open question, right and uh, you know, especially in
the first one we're going to discuss, you have something
that is it emerges as a model for the Solar
(01:49):
System or a model for the universe beyond Earth, based
on on a mix of the best available information at
the time, and then also perhaps some some other concepts
that maybe didn't need to necessarily influence a scientific or
pre even pre scientific understanding of what the universe might
(02:12):
consist of. Well, one of the things that this episode
will and uh will cause us to have to consider
is what are the ideas that people bring to the
table when they're when they're trying to decide what exists
out there in the void of space. And it's not
always as simple as just well, we look up in
the sky or we look through a telescope and we
see what we see, and if we see something then
(02:34):
then we think it's there. A lot of times there
are reasons people have for concluding that objects must be
up there in the Solar System, and what those reasons
are are about as interesting as the models themselves, right,
because you end up going from say, just pure observational
data to a working understanding of the physical world, to
(02:55):
mathematical models that are based on all of these things,
and you kind of expand downward from there. Uh and
along the way there's there's room for, you know, expectations
to build around things that end up to be uh illusory.
And so our first illusory destination is going to be
the planet and tickathon and Tikathon. So this includes i
(03:20):
would say, a sort of a a little bit of
a hint of Cathulu. There's a cosmic horror to behold.
Uh it's it stands for, of course, the opposite Earth,
the counter Earth. Yes, Uh, so please keep all seatbelts
fastened as our as we approach this hypothetical planet, because
(03:41):
we're gonna we're gonna be coming into into a close
proximity to some some very old, very alien cosmic forces here, uh,
namely a cosmos or a model for the cosmos, in
which everything, including our son, gravitates around the great Central
Fire the great central Fire is not the Sun, right,
this is something else. This is Dio's philick, the watch
(04:04):
Tower of Zeus, the prison of Zeus, the hearth altar
of the universe, all these things depending on your translation. Well,
I am on board for this journey, Robert. Tell me,
where does the idea of the Antikathon come from? Well,
the Antikathon was first proposed by Greek philosopher Philolas, who
lived from four seventy to three five b C. He
(04:27):
worked with a Pythagorean cosmological system. In his system, you
had a sphere of fixed stars, and you had the
five planets. You have the Sun, you have the Moon,
but you didn't only have Earth. You had a counter Earth,
a counter Earth. Right, And all of this is moving
around the central Fire, which again is not the Sun,
(04:47):
and the planet Antikathon. Uh. In this model remains unseen
to us. It's always hidden. Um. You know, it's it's
either below the horizon or or hidden by by by
some other fact acture of the movements of this uh.
This model. Okay, so I'm trying to picture this if
the Sun is not the central fire, but it's always
(05:09):
but Antikathon, the counter Earth is always on the opposite
side of the central fire. I guess I'm having trouble
picturing it, but maybe you can lay it out for me.
We'll lay it lay it out more. But basically, some
of these things, like the central fire and antikathon, they
would be eternally in our blind spot in this model. Okay,
So the model here explains the movement of observable and
(05:31):
and unobservable bodies as being dictated by their distance from
the central fire, so that the distant spheres of fixed
stars well that that barely moves at all. The Moon
takes a month to complete its revolution, the Sun a year.
In each planet in its own interval. The Earth is
closest to the central fire, and so it takes only
(05:51):
twenty four hours. And all of this accounts for the
apparent movement of the spheres and our cycles of night
and day. So a large part of the model is
at ten to explain why things are moving the way
there they appear to be moving. And this was something
that was worth trying to explain because even back in
the ancient world in the fourth or fifth century b C.
We didn't have telescopes yet, but there was plenty of
(06:12):
naked eye astronomy. I mean, the inner planets were known
about back then by the Babylonian astronomers. There's a lot
you could learn and study just by looking up at
the sky at night with the naked eye. But the
big question is, obviously there are things that are part
of the Solar system that that these early astronomers could
not see and had no idea existed. And yet at
(06:35):
the same time, why would a model like this need
to by necessity incorporate things that are invisible? Right? Yeah,
why would you invent an antikathon if you don't have
direct evidence that it's there? Well, Aristotle would later, and
then this depends on who you're reading. In some cases,
people interpret this as a joke. Would perhaps joke about
(06:56):
this theory and say that that, uh, Pythagoreans and in
particular fuel allows made up the hidden tenth solar body
in order to reach a perfect number of ten. Okay,
because they were really into like numbers and symmetry and
all that, and and a lot of what we understand
about this theory does come from from the writings of Aristotle,
(07:19):
and or at least what we can decipher his writings
about it. Uh, So you know whether he was whether
this was he was truly joking about this tin um
planet thing, I'm not sure, but we we still have
to give fuel Allows a great deal of credit because,
no matter what he got wrong here in an attempt
to understand the movement of the cosmos, he at least
(07:40):
used a system that didn't position the Earth or even
the Sun at the center of everything. So he was
ahead of the geocentrics and the heliocentrics in that regard.
He was also the first to create a model that
that actually lists all five planets known to antiquity in
the correct order, and in many respects he simply built
the best model possible based on existing theories, current current data,
(08:02):
and observations. Again with the with the caveat here that
he also threw into non existent bodies. So first, let's
talk about the whole center of this whole thing um
the Central Fire, and why why it's there instead of
the Earth or the Sun uh, which is further out
from the center in this model, like Earth is closest
(08:24):
to the central fire and Sun is beyond, and the
Sun is beyond that, but the central Fire is always
on the opposite side of the Earth. We can't see right,
we never get to see it, So it's possible that
it was because fire rather than earth, seemed a more
fitting elemental center to things, and the sun in this
model is apparently actually interpreted more as a like a
(08:44):
glass that reflects the inner fire to our world. And
then there's a there's a great deal of disagreement about
all the details in this model and and interpretations vary,
but something that the counter Earth is there to balance
out our Earth in some way, or that it's there
to account for eclipses, which is an interesting theory that
that that Aristotle backs up to some degree, and it
(09:06):
does remind me of similar contemplations in in Indian astronomy
that led to the creation of the eclipse demon ra Who,
which is also an astronomical body. Uh, it was you know,
determined this is a thing that is causing eclipses. So
ra who would be the demon that would come out
and eat the sun? Well, yes, in the in the
(09:27):
purely when we've discussed this on an older episode of
stuff to blow your mind. But but yeah, ra Who
was at once this demon that would come out and
eat the sun. But also uh, an astronomical calculation as
part of the model for how eclipses were occurring. And
as one of the curious facts of all this is
that as UH Indian astronomy advanced and created a more
(09:52):
accurate view of what was going on with eclipses, instead
of like keeping the religion and the mythology untouched, they
also adjusted that to make up for these new advancements
and science. Interesting. Yeah, so go back and listen to
that episode. I'll make sure to link to it on
the landing page. For this episode of Stuff to Bloil
your Mind dot com, so fiel Allows explains that the
(10:13):
Earth rotates so that it always faces away from the
central fire, so we never see it. We're tidally locked.
I guess they wouldn't have those terms back then, I suppose,
but yeah, yeah, that's an interesting idea that lots of
UH objects that orbit other objects are not rotating freely
as they orbit like we are. They're tidally locked, meaning
their rotation is synchronized to their orbit, so the same
(10:35):
side of the body always faces the inner object. Now,
of course there would be a number knowing what we
know now, there would be so many problems with this model.
Right if one side of the Earth where we just perpetually.
I guess in flames due to facing uh this this
weird cosmic non sun fire at the center of things.
That would be very bad. Yeah, But again, in this model,
(10:56):
the planets locked, it's never it never, it never sees
that we never see the fire from our side of
the planet, and likewise we never see the counter earth,
which moves at the same speed as our planet. So
I wonder did he think that there were people on
the other side of the planet who could see the
central fire. I don't believe. So, I mean, we have
to we're again, we're we're thinking with with our modern
(11:17):
model of of of what we know to be true
about the world and the Solar System, and we have
to to realize that this system was was partially constructed
on just the best materials they had at the time. Now,
it's also been suggested that the notion of a counter
Earth was introduced in this model, you know, not for
any physical reasons, not for any kind of counterbalancing reasons, etcetera.
(11:41):
But for the same reason that we find the concept
fascinating today that the you know, the notion of another
Earth is mysterious and intriguing. It you know, it's a
mirror realm just beyond our reach. In particular, ancient philosophy
scholar Peter Kingsley has proposed aspects of the model attempt
(12:02):
to factor in Hades and Tartarus. Um, Hades and Tartarus
of course, um uh, you know our our locations realms
within Greek mythology, the realms of the dead, right, So
Hades is like the sort of general realm of the dead,
and Tartarus is more like a hell. Yeah, like if
you were one of the Titans who rebelled against the gods,
(12:23):
then that is you're likely abode. So Kingsley's argument is
that both of these realms are considered to be below
the earth. Uh, Tartarus furthest of all and that would
make the counter earth Hades and the central fire Tartarus.
And this is where we get to come back to
the to Kingsley's interpretation of it is not being like
(12:43):
the Tower of Zeus, but the prison of Zeus, the
prison of the Titans. And this is so is this
an interpretation, to be clear, sometimes described as provocative. So
this is not necessarily like the uh the agreed upon
explanation for the system, but it's an interesting tape take
and it does attempt to understand the motivation for skewing
(13:04):
the model so and introducing two invisible realms into a
model of celestial mechanics. But it would mean that the
counter Earth here is the realm of the dead, a
planet of the underworld. Now a Philo Louse's model of
the heaven certainly doesn't hold up to later much less
modern astronomy. But you're probably wondering, what if there was
(13:28):
another Earth man? Maybe he's onto something there right, Well,
what if there there was another Earth orbiting at the
just the right speed so that the Sun is always
between us and our evil twin? What what if it
was always in our blind spot? Could that work? Would
we have seen it by now? If there was such
a planet, that's a good question. Yeah, if it was
(13:49):
on the opposite side of the Sun, we wouldn't really
be able to see it normally, would we. Well, on
surface level, this sounds possible, and I can, I can easily.
You can easily see where the spirals into conspiracy theory thinking, right, mean,
try to find this object with your telescope and you
will suffer a problem with the eyes. But here's the thing.
It wouldn't work because yes, we would have spotted it.
(14:10):
Because here's the thing, the movement of the planets around
the Sun are not quite this simple clockwork model that
we sometimes fix in our heads. It's not just planets
going around the Sun at at constant speeds. Now, the
gravity of other planets has a subtle influence on our orbit,
absolutely slowing us down or speeding us up. So if
(14:31):
there was another Earth on the other side of the Sun,
it would it would get a Jupiter pull or boost,
and it would inevitably give us a peek at the
hidden planet behind the Sun. So it wouldn't be able
to remain perfectly hidden forever. It would eat one of
one of the one of our Earth's would would outpace
the other just enough to get a peek of it,
and it would be revealed. But it wouldn't just be
(14:52):
the influence of say Jupiter and the other planets on it.
It would also be the influence of it on the
other planets we can see, right, Yeah, given the effect
uh that the mass of one planet has on the
orbits of other planets, we'd see it in the math.
If there was a hidden body of planetary mass on
the other side of the Sun, we would, we would
see it. It would have disrupted the orbits of our satellites.
(15:14):
And this would hold true according to NASA scientists Michael Kaiser,
even if the counter earth were only a hundred miles wide,
So it doesn't even have to be a full sized
counter earth. Uh, even if it were just relatively small,
we would be able to experience the effects detect the
effects of its presence. But let's say you're one of
those people who's like, I don't trust all that math
(15:36):
and detection stuff. I I I won't believe until I
can look for it and see it and it's not there. Well,
I mean, if if that's who you are, I probably
can't convince you. But in two thousand six, NASA's Solar
Terrestrial Relations Observatory or STEREO mission sent to satellites around
the Sun to study the solar surface, and they allowed
(15:58):
us a peek beyond the Sun and get us what,
There's no planet Hades there. So we have looked, we
have looked in the in the closet for the monster,
and Anti Kathon is nowhere to be found. Right. Yeah,
we've looked in all three ways that it would be
revealed to us. Yes, and it is not it is
not there. It's it's not even I can't. I can't
(16:18):
stress it enough. It's not just a matter of well,
we haven't seen it yet. No, it's it is not there.
Definitely not right. However, if you do want to find
a counter Earth, your best place to experience it is
in science fiction. Oh yeah, I'm sure. Though. I bet
there's some wonderful counter earth conspiracy theories out there. Oh,
I'm sure there are, but I can't imagine they're as
delightful or well, I don't know if all these are delightful. Uh,
(16:42):
let's say, I'm not sure that they could possibly be
as interesting as some of the counter earth models that
we've seen in science fiction. Though. Now, isn't Gore a
counter Earth? Yes? It is. John Norman's Gore. These are
a series, a long series of sci fi fantasy novels
in which the counter earth Gore is a world of swords,
(17:02):
techno priest King's sexual philosophy, and the Solar systems strategic
reserves of misogyny. That sounds about right, because I have
not read any of these books, but I have seen
the film The MST. Three K treatment of Outlaw of
Gore yes, just outlaw Outlaw Gore, I think, yeah, that's
the title you usually see, uh with Jack Palance, Jack Palance,
(17:27):
that's all right, Yeah, with the guy who keeps yelling
the other character's name about five hundred times in the
movie Cabin Cabin. And this was a sequel to nine
seven's Gore, which also had talents in it as well
as Oliver Read. I have not yet seen that Filiver read.
It looks fabulous. I'm waiting for for one of the
riffing services, riff Tracks or Mystery Sense Theater to finally
(17:51):
riff this film for me. Yeah, I just remember about
this movie. It's it's very it's like obviously like super sexist,
just woman hating off the chain and like really silly
fight scenes. Yeah. Well, my understanding of the book series
and I haven't and I haven't read them preaps. We
can hear from some listeners who have and have some
some feedback on them. Um, apparently they start out in
the again thirty four book series here, so they start
(18:12):
out a little more based in just sort of spaceship
and sword and sorcery, you know, kind of a John
Carter vibe to them, and then they increasingly get more
into the author's quote unquote sexual philosophy. Oh boy, um so,
I'm sure that's highly interesting. Now, another great example that
also has some mystery sense Theater three thousand, uh tie
(18:34):
in is uh my favorite Gammera movie, Gamera Versus Guron,
which features a counter earth named Tera, and it's home
to a humanoid species on the verge of extinction due
to NonStop Gaos attacks. Gaos being the sort of winged
shark creature that Gammera fights a lot with the sort
of radioactive bats that emit rays. Yeah, so this plant
(18:58):
has just been devastated by this because I guess they
don't have a Gamera. Uh, but they do have one
loan planetary guardian and it's the blade headed gear on
which if if you've ever seen a kaiju whose head
looks like just a giant blade and he's fighting Gamera,
that's him. Now, as with many of the verses things, here,
(19:18):
is it actually in the end of the movie Gammera
Versus Giron or do they team up? Oh? No, the
Guron is a total villain, So it's just a long
dooey fight between the two. Yeah. Now, what's the Godzilla
movie where aliens kidnapped Godzilla to bring him back to
their home planet to fight a monster that's attacking them. Who.
I don't remember that one. It sounds like it probably exists, though,
(19:42):
Is that Godzilla versus Monster Zero? Maybe? So I just
looked it up. Yes, I think that is it. I
don't think that took place on the counter Earth, though,
I think it's just another planet. Okay, we'll see some
other quick examples of of counter earths and fiction. Uh.
Britt Marling's Another Earth is a film that apparently explores this.
(20:02):
I haven't seen it, but I love her work on
The o A, the Netflix sci fi series. I haven't
seen it, it's good. Uh. Lars von Trier's Melancholia is
another film, another one I have not seen, which also
features a counter earth in some fashion, but I don't
I don't really watch films by that director, so I
can't speak to it. And then, of course, counter earths
(20:24):
pop up in various other sci fi properties of note,
many many a good deal better than what we've mentioned here.
But but hey, this is where you come in, the listener.
If you have a favorite counter earth or counter earth
treatment from science fiction, let us know. I would love
to hear from it. I always enjoy hearing, especially from
those of you who have really steeped in like seventies
and eighties sci fi uh novels, you know, can write
(20:47):
in and uh and and you and educate us on
what we're missing. All Right, we gotta take a quick break,
but we will be right back with more on lost planets. Alright,
we're back. What's our next destination, Joe, We've gotta be
turning in and turning down this. I want to get
on a hobby horse for a second. Okay. You know
that old expression that in space there is no up
(21:09):
or down. It's very It's like in the Wrath of Cohn, right,
you know, it's like con is thinking, is not thinking
three D enough, He's not thinking about space the right way. Uh.
And So it's technically advantageous to recognize when you're flying
around in the space there's no real top or bottom.
You can orient in any direction. And in a sense
that is true if we go into orbit around the Antikathon, say,
(21:31):
there's no reason to assume that the north pole of
Gore is up, in the south pole of Gore is down,
or vice versa. Right, and then as we've discussed before
in the show. You have more of an up and
down feel in Star Trek because it's basically a world
of ships, a world of seagoing vessels translated into a
space scenario. And then you have more recent models of
(21:52):
especially visual science fiction, such as the television series The Expanse,
which which demonstrates him more through readimensional realm of of
a cosmic military engagement. Exactly. Yeah, uh so, so it
is true that out here in space there's no ground
down beneath our feet. But in another sense, I think
(22:12):
that's really under selling how far down down goes, because
down means toward a center of gravity. That's how we
use it to mean, you know, down on Earth. And
the Solar System actually does have a bottom, and it's
about fifteen million degrees celsius. It's the core of the Sun,
the star I whose gaze you cannot hold without going blind.
(22:33):
That's all the way down in the Solar System. So
you're talking about just being if you were pulled down
the gravity well, as it's called, Yes, that's the bottom. Yeah,
straight down into the pit, straight into the open mouth
of autun And so I like thinking about it that way,
thinking about that as you get closer to the Sun,
you're actually going down into the pit. You're almost in
(22:53):
a way, going into the underworld. And so for literally
thousands of years we mentioned this earlier in the Episo so,
but since no later than the Babylonian astronomers of the
second millennium BC, humans have known about the first six planets.
You can see them with the naked eye. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter,
and Saturn. They're bright points of light passing and regressing
(23:16):
across the night sky. You don't need to telescope. Sometimes
we've watched them, we've charted their movement. And when Newton
came along, there was a revolution because we discovered the
laws that govern the way they move. And crucially, you know,
Newton came up with laws of motion that allowed us
to see that the same physical laws that controlled the
movements of the planets also controlled the movement of regular
(23:38):
objects here on Earth, whose things like gravity and momentum.
But now that we're out of the realm of saying
the ancient Greeks who were reasoning on the basis of
maybe something like Pythagorean symmetry or something like that, now
we've got real scientific tools under our belt that actually
help us learn what things are out there, and they
are good at producing accurate results. Could we use those
(24:01):
tools to see if there's something else out there that
we weren't seeing, And specifically, could we peer deep down
into the well, all the way down into the well
of the sun, to see if there's something in that
direction we're not seeing. So I wanna turn to my
man urbane. You know it's spelled urbane. That is not
the French way. I think it's our bond or bond.
(24:24):
Jean Joseph Laverier a French astronomer who lived eighteen eleven
to eighteen seventy seven, and in eighteen thirty seven Laverier
was appointed to a position at the Polytechnic School in Paris,
where he began a long study of the planet Mercury,
which is of course the innermost planet in the Solar
System that we know about now. It's the closest to
(24:44):
the Sun. And he was doing things like creating tables
of observation of the planet's orbit. And if that sounds
like boring work, you should know that there's a wrinkle here.
There's actually a mystery involved in Mercury's orbit. See, Mercury's
orbit is not what it should have been given the
planet's momentum and the gravitational influences on it that we
(25:06):
knew about. There's this phenomenon known as the precession of
the parahelion of Mercury. Real quick point. A parahelion is
the point of least distance from the Sun during an
object's orbit. Right, Yes, it's the point when it comes closest.
So essentially, the precession of the parahelion of Mercury means
that every year on Mercury, every time Mercury goes around
(25:29):
the Sun, its orbits sort of shifts forward. So if
you imagine getting up on the north pole of the
Sun and of Mercury and looking down at the solar plane,
um you're looking down at Mercury's path with a time
lapse tracing its movement across the years. It would not
repeat the same path every year, but instead it would
sort of shift forward a bit with every trip around
(25:52):
the Sun, drawing more kind of a daisy pedal or
spirograph type pattern. And the question is what caused this?
So fortunately the astronomers of the nineteenth century were armed
with that great investigative tool in the history of science.
The physics of Isaac Newton, and the physics of Isaac
Newton was extremely good at predicting the movements of a
(26:13):
planet by knowing it's inertia, the uniform motion of the
planet through space, and by knowing gravity the mutual attraction
to other centers of mass that were out there. And generally,
Newton's laws had proved really accurate, astonishingly good actually at
predicting planetary motion. And if you took into account all
the relevant influences, the physical influences we knew about, you
could just predict where the planets would go, except Mercury.
(26:37):
And so Newton's laws accounted for almost all of the
observed procession of the orbit of Mercury, but not quite all.
There's still just a bit of steady change in the
planet's orbit that stubbornly remained unexplained, making the orbit of
Mercury this stubborn and mysterious problem in Laverier's time. But
in eighteen forty five Laverier he's working on a different problem.
(27:00):
He changes his focus briefly to focus on the curious
case of another planet in the Solar System see uh
I mentioned earlier that we've known about the first six
planets in the Solar System since ancient times, but in
the nineteenth century astronomers were still dealing with a relatively
recent edition. And think about how weird this is, like
two at a time for the first time in thousands
of years that we knew about another planet, and that
(27:22):
planet was How do we say this planet's name on
the podcast Robert, do we just say Uranus? Well? Uranus
is fun? Is is more fun? It's more humorous. Um
I often I often say Uranus, though that almost sounds
like a uranist. Like uranist, it's a professional urinator in
many respects. It's an unfortunately named planet. Yeah, it maybe
(27:44):
could have been worse. I don't know if this would
be worse or not. So it was discovered in seventeen
eighty one Uranus. That was Uranus. Sorry, that was the
first time it was seen by a human and it
was by the German born British astronomer William Herschel, who
found the planet during a survey of the stars, and
he wanted to call it not Uranus or Uranus, but
(28:05):
Georgie um sidus or the star of George, after King
George the third of England. Uh, and I'm glad that
name got scrapped in in favor of a much more
dignified mythological anus reference. Yeah. Even even with the the
anus right in there, it it has more of a
ring to it than than this Georgia um citizen business. Well,
(28:26):
I mean, oh, how horrible that would be the name
of planet after just like a human king. Kings suck, Yes, absolutely,
I mean kings, they they have all these other things.
Let's at least leave their names off of the planet. Yeah,
stick to mythical references please. But anyway, like mercury, Uranus
was this kind of like spear mysterious, right. Uranus also
(28:46):
wobbled in its orbit. Its path around the Sun was
different from what we would predict given the gravitational influences
that we knew about. So Laverier took this mystery and
he turned it into one of the great success stories
in the history of any scientific theory. He conjured a
planet out of the void, and his assumptions were really simple.
(29:06):
So he took the known laws of physics, he took
Newton's laws, and he asked, you know, given these laws,
what could make Uranus orbit as irregular as we observe.
And the answer he came up with was, well, another
planet could do it. He calculated how big that other
planet would have to be and where exactly would have
to be in relation to Uranus, and then he put
(29:28):
that prediction to the test. He wrote down his predictions
in a letter to a German astronomer named Johann Ji
Gala and asked him to look for this eighth planet
with his instruments and using Laverier's predictions. Gala found the
planet Neptune after only about an hour of looking for it,
within one degree of exactly where Laverier had predicted. And
(29:50):
I should also just note that an English astronomer named
John c Adams also calculated the position of the planet
that would come to be known as Neptune independently around
the same time. But in both they're essentially using the
math to determine where this this unknown planet would be.
And then it is confirmed that there is of course
a planet there, and yeah, and this is like the
(30:10):
classic case of like when when a scientific theory works best, right,
when a scientific theory tells you how things work in
a way that allows you to extrapolate from what you know,
to what you predict you should find in the future,
and then you go out and look and find exactly Yeah,
you find exactly what you predicted. So this is like
(30:31):
a great win for Newton's theories. Right then the prediction
was a huge success. It led to Laverier being given
all kinds of medals and honorary appointments, and he was
eventually made the head of the Astronomical Observatory in Paris.
He had he had plucked Neptune out of space, armed
with nothing but the power of Newton's laws. And so
then after this, Laverier decides to go back to his
(30:52):
old subject. He turns his attention back to Mercury and
the problem of Mercuries or I think everybody can see
where we're going here, right, Yeah, So you can guess
what the temptation might be. Laverier had just achieved awesome
fame by predicting a previously undiscovered planet. What if there
was another? So he came up with a prediction for
(31:13):
something with mass very close to the Sun inside the
orbit of Mercury, maybe another asteroid belt or another planet.
It would be something with mass that that could cause
Mercury's orbit to wobble in the way he had measured
so precisely when making his tables. And then here's the
real kicker. Just like Neptune, this InterPlaNet was also discovered.
(31:37):
So here I want to rely on the work of
a of an author named Thomas Levinson from a book
called The Hunt for Vulcan from Random House in and
in an interview with nat Gio, Levinson describes the first
sighting of the planet at the bottom of the Pit,
which was by an amateur French astronomer named Edmund Modesta
(31:58):
Lescarbot on March eightifty nine. So you've got that he's
this country doctor. Uh, he was a country doctor by trade,
and he's got an observatory in a stone barn in
his backyard. Yeah, this is this is often the case
when we're talking about astronomy from this area. We're getting
into the realm of the gentleman scientist. Yes, yeah, he's
sort of like he dabbles. Maybe. So one day in
(32:20):
eighteen fifty nine, less Garbo took a break in between
seeing patients and he went out to his telescope to
observe the sun. And uh, and Levinson says, quote as
he trains his telescope on the Sun. He sees a
round object on the face of the Sun. He times
it as it moves steadily across the Sun, records the data.
(32:40):
Then another patient arrives, so he checks out that patient,
then comes back to the barn. This round dot is
still crossing the Sun. He tracks it continuously, taking notes
on its path until it finally goes over the other
edge of the Sun. And so, after making this observation
less Garbo, he reads about Laverier's prediction. He gets all
(33:00):
excited and he writes a letter to Laverier describing what
he saw crossing the disc of the Sun. So Laverier
had predicted this planet would be in there, and then
let's go Bo saw it. And apparently Laverier was at
a New Year's Eve party when he got the letter,
and he just left and he's like, oh boy, and
he went out to Lescarbo's house, which was a trip
that Levinson said involved a train ride in a twelve
(33:23):
mile walk. So he was obviously excited. I mean, you
find one planet, you kind of get hooked on it, right,
we got to find another. Um So lavery A confirmed
the observation, and this InterPlaNet got a name. It came
to be known as Vulcan. That's a good name because
Vulcan in in in the mythological sense is is close
to the forge. Yes, he's the forge, got exactly. He's
(33:45):
the Hifastus type figure. He's down there with the fires
beating the steel. And this triggered a period of what
Levinson called vulcan Mania. So suddenly astronomers all over the
world you're trying to find Vulcan, and quite a few
reported finding it, like during an eclipse in eight seventy eight.
Levinson tells the story that Thomas Edison happened to be
(34:05):
in the path of totality for a for a solar
eclipse in Wyoming, and he was there to try out
an infrared radiation sinsor he had created, which actually did
not work in the end. But so he's out there
for the eclipse and he ends up coming across a
pair of Vulcan hunters who were using the eclipse to
try to spot the planet, because obviously, if you think
about this, it's hard to see a planet that's close
(34:26):
to the Sun under normal circumstances. But if you wait
for a solar eclipse and the Moon blocks out the light,
of the Sun. Suddenly you can look up there and say, okay,
is there anything there? The two Vulcan hunters here in
the story where Simon Newcomb and James Craig Watson, and
the report goes that Newcomb could not find the planet.
He looked for Vulcan during the eclipse. He didn't see anything.
(34:47):
But Watson said he saw it. He said a star
was near the Sun which had never been documented before.
It was not on any of his charts, and it
had to be the planet Vulcan. In an article for Nautilus,
Levinson writes a about Watson, citing quote Watson saw very
close to the limb of the Sun, a ruddy star,
just where Vulcan ought to have been. So the discovery
(35:08):
of Vulcan was reported in the New York Times, in
papers around the world. It was huge and exciting news,
and there were even cases were like doubters and skeptics
about Vulcan were sort of pooh pooed and made fun of.
But if you know your solar system now you might
be wondering. Okay, so what happened? We didn't memorize that
one in school, right, So yeah, what happened to Vulcan
(35:29):
and Vulcan Mania. Well. Of course, many others simply failed
to find the planet. Other people looked for it and
never saw what the people who found it said they saw.
But what really killed it was a change in the
theoretical framework that had predicted it. That change was what
was brought about with Einstein in the theory of general relativity.
So when Einstein devised his theory, one of the key
(35:50):
elements is that space and time may have their geometry
altered by large amounts of mass and energy, and that
an object traveling close to a massive object like a
star would be effective by these deformations of spacetime. And
what Einstein found here was that his theory, when he
did the math, almost perfectly predicted the precession of the
(36:12):
parahelion of Mercury without invoking any elusive hidden planets. Reportedly,
you know, when Einstein made these calculations and discovered that
his theory had finally explained the leftover bits of Mercury's wobble,
he was so excited that he felt heart palpitations and
couldn't work for days, because here's this lingering mystery and astronomy.
It had led people to hypothesize phantom planets that weren't
(36:34):
actually there. And finally, just by re envisioning exactly how
gravity worked and what the shape of space time was,
he had explained it. Now with this new theory, it
matched all of the observations from the past. Like this
is like a Scooby Doo mystery, Like the ghost is
no longer required because because he has pulled the mask
off of the villain and exposed it. Yeah, Einstein, he
(36:57):
made a name for himself by killing a planet of
the Vulcan was dead. But I like to think about
and Levinson points out some stuff about this too, the
interesting fact that in a way Laverier was sort of
doing everything right right, you know. He was like, as
a scientist, he was like, Okay, well, I've got a
theory that I think works right. You know, you've got
Newtonian mechanics. They they have made correct predictions before, so
(37:20):
I'll use them to make a prediction again, and in
much the manner of predictions that have worked out in
the past. And then you go to the tests and say, okay,
does anybody empirically confirm what I predicted? And people did, Yeah,
I mean this is I mean getting it wrong too.
Is part of the process here. Uh, you form the
best hypothesis based on the materials you have to work with,
(37:42):
and then eventually you know it's going to be proven disproven,
or or or somewhere in between, tweaked to account for
new information about the world. I mean, I wonder what
was going on in the case of the people who
said that they saw vulcan Like were they I mean,
was it just the case that these were instances where
(38:04):
people did see something and they were just confused about
what it was. Or were they cases where people were
so excited to you know, want to see what they
were expecting to see that that it. You know, maybe
they wouldn't have seen something otherwise, but they just had
their their biases going. Oh. I think I think it
was all of those. I mean, we've talked about on
the show before, the enthusiasm around spying the canals of Mars,
(38:31):
you know, um, and and certainly that similar excitement involved there.
But in this case we're dealing with something that is
perhaps even less obvious to untrained eyes, perhaps just a
little easier to fool yourself on if you have just
just the right amount of enthusiasm, if you're gazing up
at at an eclipse like which, which even with appropriate
(38:54):
gear is is an overwhelming situation. Yeah, it's emotionally arousing. Yeah,
you might say, just a generally extreme proposition. Yes, And
and I'll advise, just in case we're not clear here,
do not listen to the show and go out and
stare at the sun looking for phantom planets? Right though,
I would advise you do visit a solar observatory. Absolutely, yes.
(39:15):
Should we take a break and then explore one last
lost daughter of Aten? Let's do it. Alright, we're back,
so we've cast Vulcan aside Vulcan. Vulcan's out, so dead,
So let's go through the planets. We have Wait a minute,
what about Antikathon always dead too, it's dead too. Central
Fire also gone. So we have Mercury, okay, Venus, Earth, Mars,
(39:37):
and then of course, oh okay, we'll see Did you
say Phaeton? I said Phaeton? What is Phaeton? All right? Yep?
This is the This, this is our next destination in
the podcast, named for the son of Helios and Greek myth,
and this was the This was for a brief period,
a hypothetical planet between Mars, and Jupiter. Now I know
(40:01):
that there is something between Mars and Jupiter. Well, yeah,
so we have the rubble of an asteroid belt between
Mars and the gas giant. So the hypothesis here, just
to get it out of the way right from the start,
is that the asteroid belt used to be a planet,
which we are going to call Phaeton. Okay, So it's
like in Star Wars, after the planet Alderan gets blown
(40:23):
up by the Death Stact and they arrive in the
Millennium Falcon and what's there a bunch of like rocks
floating around in space. That's sort of like the asteroid
belt after the planet Phaeton has been destroyed. Right, So
the basic idea here is Phaeton. The planet is gone
and all we have is is rubble. Now why name
it Phaeton? This is pretty fun too. That's because in mythology,
(40:47):
um Phaeton borrows his dad's sun chariot, He borrows the
chariot of Helios, and I just guess, guess, just goes
on a wild ride on this thing. It just totally
wipes out. So they're number of different paintings of him
falling off the chariot of the Sun, crashing the chariot
of the sun. Um. There's a there's one particular fresco
(41:09):
fresco um. This was done eight. This is not an
Internet humor thing, no, no, but it's like, yeah, it's
like a fresco and you're looking up and there is
a phaeton driving the chariot and he is, as you said,
you might say, straight porky pigging it. He's just he's
he's wearing robes and all at least on his torso,
(41:31):
and it's just naked button genitals hanging out. This is
absolutely the most prominent scrotum I have ever seen in
a Renaissance painting. So I don't know, maybe he wrecked
the chariot because he was wearing no pants. I don't know.
Maybe uh, maybe this is part of the accident, like
he's he's wiping out so bad that his pants are
just immediately vaporized. Well, no, I think what we need
(41:55):
to what we must accept is that actually this painting
by Dominico Riccio. I don't know if you said the
name that I didn't know. That's the painter here. This
painting here is anatomically correct. This is what a chariot
wreck would look like. For god wearing robes. We just
normally are coddled by painters who must represent the gods
(42:15):
in a tasteful pose. This is like the cinema verity
of Renaissance painting of of classical gods. So I highly
recommend looking it up if you get a chance. Um,
and maybe I'll include a link on the landing page
that though it will almost certainly not be the main
art for the episode. So so, anyway, I know what
everyone's thinking. Or sorry, Okay, I've got it. There's this
(42:36):
idea that what's the asteroid belt doing there? Okay, maybe
it used to be a planet, But the way we
actually get to the formation of this Phaeton hypothesis is
a lot more interesting than that. And it comes down
again to UH, to the math, to a mathematical model,
and then and then someone saying, well, what what should
(42:57):
go here? What would what would make this model work?
What would fill in the missing blank? While a planet?
Of course, so you're saying there's a mathematical UH prediction
or mathematical theory that otherwise holds true, that the predicted
other things accurately and would have predicted a planet where
the asteroid belt is right, and it all has to
(43:17):
do with what's known as uh the Titches Bode law.
This is a hypothesis of planetary sequence named for Johan
Daniel Tichus and Johan Alert Bode. The two Johan's Johan
and Johan and um this was now in the Yeah.
This was proposed by German astronomer Tithis in seventeen sixty
(43:38):
six and popularized by Bode in seventeen seventy two. And
and to explain what all this is about, let's consider
the sequence of planets again. This time you know what
we know Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Now considered
this sequence of numbers, Okay, zero, three, six, twelve, twenty four.
(44:00):
Each number after three is twice the previous number, So
zero and then three, and then we go to six,
then to twelve, and twenty four. Makes sense add four
to each of these numbers and then divide them by ten,
and the result is as follows. Zero point four, zero
(44:21):
point seven, one point zero, one point six, two point eight,
five point two, ten point zero. Six of these numbers
closely approximate the distances of our planets from the Sun
in astronomical units. Are a use to refresh one au
is the rough distance between the Earth and the Sun.
(44:44):
So point four a use mercury point seven, Venus one
Earth naturally one point six Mars two point eight. They're
not a planet, bunch of question marks. Five point two
is Jupiter and ten is Saturn. So what's going on
with two point eight? You're saying? Otherwise, the distance of
the planets from the Sun pretty closely followed this sequence
(45:08):
of numbers in an orderly way, right, the than the
planets known to exist at the time. And and so
m bode especially he said, he there's a quote from me.
He says, can one believe that the founder of the
universe had left this space empty? Right? How why would
he mess with us like that? Right? I mean, but
then I mean without invoking the almighty though, coming back
(45:29):
to just the pure math, you can see where they
would say, well, look this, this, this mathematical sequence lines
up otherwise perfectly with the with the distances of the planet.
So what's going on here? Yeah, you would have to
think if there if there were never a planet there,
that's just a really odd coincidence that all the other
planets line up so well, right, And the other important
(45:49):
fact here is that at this time, Uh, the asteroid
belt was not known, so it was just a blank spot.
They weren't even saying, oh, where there should be a
planet here, there's asteroid belt. No, they just appeared to
be nothing. Now I do wonder if even though they
didn't know about the asteroid belt, would they know about
some of the largest of the asteroids. Well, in eighteen
o one they began too, because that's when we discovered
(46:12):
the asteroid series and our understanding of the asteroid belt began.
And at first, Series alone seemed to be the answer, like,
surely this was the planet only. Series is not a
true planet. It's a minor planet or dwarf planet, depending
on how you want to classify it. It's the thirty
third largest known body in the Solar System, and the
asteroid belt itself contains various smaller minor planets and irregularly
(46:35):
shaped bodies. The total mass of these rocks, if you
were to try and as symbol them all into a planet,
into a phaeton, if you will, would be about four
percent of the Earth's moon and uh, and so you
know that's not quite a planet's worth. And then the
belt it's itself, we when we we know now that
it was it formed in the Solar nebula and would become, uh,
(46:58):
that would become the Solar System. But gravitational gravitational perturbations
from Jupiter prevented the lumps from a creating into a planet.
There was just too much orbital energy. But the idea
here that they had was that, okay, we're discovering all
these pieces. Maybe they are pieces of of of something else,
something that was there before. So Phaeton would have been
(47:21):
that planet and uh and it would have at some
point been destroyed, becoming the asteroid belt. And we got
to this point because in eighteen o two, German astronomer
Heinrich Wilhelm math house Olds proposed that these might be
the remains of a planet, and then linguist Johan goldleb
Ratloff proposed the name Phaeton. I mean, really he had
(47:42):
the easy part. He just came along and said, hey,
call it Phaeton. Maybe he was just a big fan
of that painting. Yeah, maybe so. And all of this
was in line with what would be known as disruption theory,
which was the idea that there was some former planet
here that was destroyed by Jupiter's gravity or a space
collision or manner of internal turmoil, or the effects of
(48:02):
some other hypothetical, hypothetical local cosmic body. But we know
now that no such planet never existed, or at least
the evidence is against it. The evidence is against it.
There was there, there doesn't seem to have ever been
something there to explode. Plus, UH, the the Titches Bode
law is now just considered a mathematical curiosity, and not
(48:24):
only because phaeton didn't work out. UH. It is interesting
that the sequence holds true for Uranus, which was discovered
later in seventeen eighty one. Wait are you are you
abandoning ground on Urinus again? Um? Well no, I could
just I mean, we're already talking about Phaeton um porky
picking it, So I guess we can. We can use Uranus.
(48:45):
The sequence holds true for Uranus as well, UH, discovered
in seventeen eighty one, UH at nineteen eight years. But
here's the thing. Neptune and then Pluto break the sequence.
So the sequence the law does not hold up to
the UH discovery of additional bodies in our solar system. Okay,
so our apologies to the two yo Han's, but again
(49:08):
they were doing exactly what one should do. They were looking,
they were looking at the at the data, they were
they were looking at the observations, and they were trying
to figure out what was going on, Why why is
the observable solar system not matching up with this mathematical
pattern that we have seen elsewhere. And then when they
begin to discover something in the exact place where something
(49:32):
should be to meet this sequence, I mean, that's compelling. Well,
I mean it's just a reminder that, of course, uh,
you know, even when you're sort of when you're sort
of like doing science right, like you're not out there
just proposing ancient aliens because it feels good or something like.
You know, you've got a theory that has a track
record of of correctly, uh predicting some things in the past,
(49:53):
so you're you're trying to extrapolate to the future. That
that's in a way how science usually works when it
works correct actually, but it can still lead you astray,
and you've always gotta you've always just got to return
to the well of empirical observation and keep trying to
figure things out and refining. You don't and you don't
want to be too married to the idea that you're
going to discover a planet, because then that can skew
your your observations and uh and just the the the
(50:17):
overall integrity of what you're trying to do. There's nothing
like the rush of discovering a planet. You you can
tell people they were just like chomping for it. Like
if if, for instance, if you were seeking to discover
a counter Earth because you believe that to be Hades,
you believed it to be uh, the nether realm, and
that discovering it would then prove something some religious model
(50:41):
that was important to you. Um, you know that that
that would be an example of of of over zealous exploration.
Like you're clearly you're uh, you know, the the the
exploration is out a whack at that point. That would
make for a pretty good sci fi story. I propose
a principle known as let's call it agents Razor, where
(51:02):
it is you do not needlessly multiply gores. Yes, if
your if your model of the Solar System can work
without the inclusion of a phantom planet, uh, then then
then that's the direction you should go in. But however,
is we're going to discuss in a future episode of
stuff to blow your mind. Uh, that's not quite it.
For phantom planets in our own solar system. There there
(51:24):
still remain uh uh you know, at least a one
or two that are still talked about. Oh, yes, shall
we return, Yes we should, but we'll leave those phantom
planets for next time. Okay, all right. Uh. In the meantime,
if you want to check out our homepage, it is
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership.
That's where we'll find all the episodes and also a
(51:45):
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(52:07):
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Big thanks, as always to our excellent audio producers Alex
(52:29):
Williams and Tory Harrison. If you would like to get
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or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
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blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for
(52:52):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com? Yeah, I lit four four
Greetings, traveler. Take a seat, strap yourself in pre order
any of the various microgravity snacks and cocktails on our
in flight menu. As we leave Earth's atmosphere, we will
engage the Loco Knot engine, which will allow us to
cross the boundaries between our world and other worlds that
could have been. Instead of visiting the actual planets of
(00:22):
our Solar system, we will visit the various hypothetical Solar
System objects that all seemed possible at one point. Counting
down five four three two one. Welcome to Stuff to
(00:44):
Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
wasn't it stuff to blow your mind? My name is
Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back to
explore some of the furthest reaches of space, about as
far as you can go into space, the part of
space that never existed in the first place, or is,
(01:07):
or in some cases, as we'll get into in an
upcoming episode, things that have not been completely substantiated in
the dark outer regions of our Solar system. Right, So,
today Robert and I wanted to explore hypothetical Solar System objects,
objects believe to be out there in our local galactic
neighborhood within the domain of influence of our home star,
(01:29):
the Sun. Uh. And there have been tons of objects
like this over the years that have been proposed to
be out there, some that we now know aren't actually
there or were never there. Others that maybe there's still
an open question, right and uh, you know, especially in
the first one we're going to discuss, you have something
that is it emerges as a model for the Solar
(01:49):
System or a model for the universe beyond Earth, based
on on a mix of the best available information at
the time, and then also perhaps some some other concepts
that maybe didn't need to necessarily influence a scientific or
pre even pre scientific understanding of what the universe might
(02:12):
consist of. Well, one of the things that this episode
will and uh will cause us to have to consider
is what are the ideas that people bring to the
table when they're when they're trying to decide what exists
out there in the void of space. And it's not
always as simple as just well, we look up in
the sky or we look through a telescope and we
see what we see, and if we see something then
(02:34):
then we think it's there. A lot of times there
are reasons people have for concluding that objects must be
up there in the Solar System, and what those reasons
are are about as interesting as the models themselves, right,
because you end up going from say, just pure observational
data to a working understanding of the physical world, to
(02:55):
mathematical models that are based on all of these things,
and you kind of expand downward from there. Uh and
along the way there's there's room for, you know, expectations
to build around things that end up to be uh illusory.
And so our first illusory destination is going to be
the planet and tickathon and Tikathon. So this includes i
(03:20):
would say, a sort of a a little bit of
a hint of Cathulu. There's a cosmic horror to behold.
Uh it's it stands for, of course, the opposite Earth,
the counter Earth. Yes, Uh, so please keep all seatbelts
fastened as our as we approach this hypothetical planet, because
(03:41):
we're gonna we're gonna be coming into into a close
proximity to some some very old, very alien cosmic forces here, uh,
namely a cosmos or a model for the cosmos, in
which everything, including our son, gravitates around the great Central
Fire the great central Fire is not the Sun, right,
this is something else. This is Dio's philick, the watch
(04:04):
Tower of Zeus, the prison of Zeus, the hearth altar
of the universe, all these things depending on your translation. Well,
I am on board for this journey, Robert. Tell me,
where does the idea of the Antikathon come from? Well,
the Antikathon was first proposed by Greek philosopher Philolas, who
lived from four seventy to three five b C. He
(04:27):
worked with a Pythagorean cosmological system. In his system, you
had a sphere of fixed stars, and you had the
five planets. You have the Sun, you have the Moon,
but you didn't only have Earth. You had a counter Earth,
a counter Earth. Right, And all of this is moving
around the central Fire, which again is not the Sun,
(04:47):
and the planet Antikathon. Uh. In this model remains unseen
to us. It's always hidden. Um. You know, it's it's
either below the horizon or or hidden by by by
some other fact acture of the movements of this uh.
This model. Okay, so I'm trying to picture this if
the Sun is not the central fire, but it's always
(05:09):
but Antikathon, the counter Earth is always on the opposite
side of the central fire. I guess I'm having trouble
picturing it, but maybe you can lay it out for me.
We'll lay it lay it out more. But basically, some
of these things, like the central fire and antikathon, they
would be eternally in our blind spot in this model. Okay,
So the model here explains the movement of observable and
(05:31):
and unobservable bodies as being dictated by their distance from
the central fire, so that the distant spheres of fixed
stars well that that barely moves at all. The Moon
takes a month to complete its revolution, the Sun a year.
In each planet in its own interval. The Earth is
closest to the central fire, and so it takes only
(05:51):
twenty four hours. And all of this accounts for the
apparent movement of the spheres and our cycles of night
and day. So a large part of the model is
at ten to explain why things are moving the way
there they appear to be moving. And this was something
that was worth trying to explain because even back in
the ancient world in the fourth or fifth century b C.
We didn't have telescopes yet, but there was plenty of
(06:12):
naked eye astronomy. I mean, the inner planets were known
about back then by the Babylonian astronomers. There's a lot
you could learn and study just by looking up at
the sky at night with the naked eye. But the
big question is, obviously there are things that are part
of the Solar system that that these early astronomers could
not see and had no idea existed. And yet at
(06:35):
the same time, why would a model like this need
to by necessity incorporate things that are invisible? Right? Yeah,
why would you invent an antikathon if you don't have
direct evidence that it's there? Well, Aristotle would later, and
then this depends on who you're reading. In some cases,
people interpret this as a joke. Would perhaps joke about
(06:56):
this theory and say that that, uh, Pythagoreans and in
particular fuel allows made up the hidden tenth solar body
in order to reach a perfect number of ten. Okay,
because they were really into like numbers and symmetry and
all that, and and a lot of what we understand
about this theory does come from from the writings of Aristotle,
(07:19):
and or at least what we can decipher his writings
about it. Uh, So you know whether he was whether
this was he was truly joking about this tin um
planet thing, I'm not sure, but we we still have
to give fuel Allows a great deal of credit because,
no matter what he got wrong here in an attempt
to understand the movement of the cosmos, he at least
(07:40):
used a system that didn't position the Earth or even
the Sun at the center of everything. So he was
ahead of the geocentrics and the heliocentrics in that regard.
He was also the first to create a model that
that actually lists all five planets known to antiquity in
the correct order, and in many respects he simply built
the best model possible based on existing theories, current current data,
(08:02):
and observations. Again with the with the caveat here that
he also threw into non existent bodies. So first, let's
talk about the whole center of this whole thing um
the Central Fire, and why why it's there instead of
the Earth or the Sun uh, which is further out
from the center in this model, like Earth is closest
(08:24):
to the central fire and Sun is beyond, and the
Sun is beyond that, but the central Fire is always
on the opposite side of the Earth. We can't see right,
we never get to see it, So it's possible that
it was because fire rather than earth, seemed a more
fitting elemental center to things, and the sun in this
model is apparently actually interpreted more as a like a
(08:44):
glass that reflects the inner fire to our world. And
then there's a there's a great deal of disagreement about
all the details in this model and and interpretations vary,
but something that the counter Earth is there to balance
out our Earth in some way, or that it's there
to account for eclipses, which is an interesting theory that
that that Aristotle backs up to some degree, and it
(09:06):
does remind me of similar contemplations in in Indian astronomy
that led to the creation of the eclipse demon ra Who,
which is also an astronomical body. Uh, it was you know,
determined this is a thing that is causing eclipses. So
ra who would be the demon that would come out
and eat the sun? Well, yes, in the in the
(09:27):
purely when we've discussed this on an older episode of
stuff to blow your mind. But but yeah, ra Who
was at once this demon that would come out and
eat the sun. But also uh, an astronomical calculation as
part of the model for how eclipses were occurring. And
as one of the curious facts of all this is
that as UH Indian astronomy advanced and created a more
(09:52):
accurate view of what was going on with eclipses, instead
of like keeping the religion and the mythology untouched, they
also adjusted that to make up for these new advancements
and science. Interesting. Yeah, so go back and listen to
that episode. I'll make sure to link to it on
the landing page. For this episode of Stuff to Bloil
your Mind dot com, so fiel Allows explains that the
(10:13):
Earth rotates so that it always faces away from the
central fire, so we never see it. We're tidally locked.
I guess they wouldn't have those terms back then, I suppose,
but yeah, yeah, that's an interesting idea that lots of
UH objects that orbit other objects are not rotating freely
as they orbit like we are. They're tidally locked, meaning
their rotation is synchronized to their orbit, so the same
(10:35):
side of the body always faces the inner object. Now,
of course there would be a number knowing what we
know now, there would be so many problems with this model.
Right if one side of the Earth where we just perpetually.
I guess in flames due to facing uh this this
weird cosmic non sun fire at the center of things.
That would be very bad. Yeah, But again, in this model,
(10:56):
the planets locked, it's never it never, it never sees
that we never see the fire from our side of
the planet, and likewise we never see the counter earth,
which moves at the same speed as our planet. So
I wonder did he think that there were people on
the other side of the planet who could see the
central fire. I don't believe. So, I mean, we have
to we're again, we're we're thinking with with our modern
(11:17):
model of of of what we know to be true
about the world and the Solar System, and we have
to to realize that this system was was partially constructed
on just the best materials they had at the time. Now,
it's also been suggested that the notion of a counter
Earth was introduced in this model, you know, not for
any physical reasons, not for any kind of counterbalancing reasons, etcetera.
(11:41):
But for the same reason that we find the concept
fascinating today that the you know, the notion of another
Earth is mysterious and intriguing. It you know, it's a
mirror realm just beyond our reach. In particular, ancient philosophy
scholar Peter Kingsley has proposed aspects of the model attempt
(12:02):
to factor in Hades and Tartarus. Um, Hades and Tartarus
of course, um uh, you know our our locations realms
within Greek mythology, the realms of the dead, right, So
Hades is like the sort of general realm of the dead,
and Tartarus is more like a hell. Yeah, like if
you were one of the Titans who rebelled against the gods,
(12:23):
then that is you're likely abode. So Kingsley's argument is
that both of these realms are considered to be below
the earth. Uh, Tartarus furthest of all and that would
make the counter earth Hades and the central fire Tartarus.
And this is where we get to come back to
the to Kingsley's interpretation of it is not being like
(12:43):
the Tower of Zeus, but the prison of Zeus, the
prison of the Titans. And this is so is this
an interpretation, to be clear, sometimes described as provocative. So
this is not necessarily like the uh the agreed upon
explanation for the system, but it's an interesting tape take
and it does attempt to understand the motivation for skewing
(13:04):
the model so and introducing two invisible realms into a
model of celestial mechanics. But it would mean that the
counter Earth here is the realm of the dead, a
planet of the underworld. Now a Philo Louse's model of
the heaven certainly doesn't hold up to later much less
modern astronomy. But you're probably wondering, what if there was
(13:28):
another Earth man? Maybe he's onto something there right, Well,
what if there there was another Earth orbiting at the
just the right speed so that the Sun is always
between us and our evil twin? What what if it
was always in our blind spot? Could that work? Would
we have seen it by now? If there was such
a planet, that's a good question. Yeah, if it was
(13:49):
on the opposite side of the Sun, we wouldn't really
be able to see it normally, would we. Well, on
surface level, this sounds possible, and I can, I can easily.
You can easily see where the spirals into conspiracy theory thinking, right, mean,
try to find this object with your telescope and you
will suffer a problem with the eyes. But here's the thing.
It wouldn't work because yes, we would have spotted it.
(14:10):
Because here's the thing, the movement of the planets around
the Sun are not quite this simple clockwork model that
we sometimes fix in our heads. It's not just planets
going around the Sun at at constant speeds. Now, the
gravity of other planets has a subtle influence on our orbit,
absolutely slowing us down or speeding us up. So if
(14:31):
there was another Earth on the other side of the Sun,
it would it would get a Jupiter pull or boost,
and it would inevitably give us a peek at the
hidden planet behind the Sun. So it wouldn't be able
to remain perfectly hidden forever. It would eat one of
one of the one of our Earth's would would outpace
the other just enough to get a peek of it,
and it would be revealed. But it wouldn't just be
(14:52):
the influence of say Jupiter and the other planets on it.
It would also be the influence of it on the
other planets we can see, right, Yeah, given the effect
uh that the mass of one planet has on the
orbits of other planets, we'd see it in the math.
If there was a hidden body of planetary mass on
the other side of the Sun, we would, we would
see it. It would have disrupted the orbits of our satellites.
(15:14):
And this would hold true according to NASA scientists Michael Kaiser,
even if the counter earth were only a hundred miles wide,
So it doesn't even have to be a full sized
counter earth. Uh, even if it were just relatively small,
we would be able to experience the effects detect the
effects of its presence. But let's say you're one of
those people who's like, I don't trust all that math
(15:36):
and detection stuff. I I I won't believe until I
can look for it and see it and it's not there. Well,
I mean, if if that's who you are, I probably
can't convince you. But in two thousand six, NASA's Solar
Terrestrial Relations Observatory or STEREO mission sent to satellites around
the Sun to study the solar surface, and they allowed
(15:58):
us a peek beyond the Sun and get us what,
There's no planet Hades there. So we have looked, we
have looked in the in the closet for the monster,
and Anti Kathon is nowhere to be found. Right. Yeah,
we've looked in all three ways that it would be
revealed to us. Yes, and it is not it is
not there. It's it's not even I can't. I can't
(16:18):
stress it enough. It's not just a matter of well,
we haven't seen it yet. No, it's it is not there.
Definitely not right. However, if you do want to find
a counter Earth, your best place to experience it is
in science fiction. Oh yeah, I'm sure. Though. I bet
there's some wonderful counter earth conspiracy theories out there. Oh,
I'm sure there are, but I can't imagine they're as
delightful or well, I don't know if all these are delightful. Uh,
(16:42):
let's say, I'm not sure that they could possibly be
as interesting as some of the counter earth models that
we've seen in science fiction. Though. Now, isn't Gore a
counter Earth? Yes? It is. John Norman's Gore. These are
a series, a long series of sci fi fantasy novels
in which the counter earth Gore is a world of swords,
(17:02):
techno priest King's sexual philosophy, and the Solar systems strategic
reserves of misogyny. That sounds about right, because I have
not read any of these books, but I have seen
the film The MST. Three K treatment of Outlaw of
Gore yes, just outlaw Outlaw Gore, I think, yeah, that's
the title you usually see, uh with Jack Palance, Jack Palance,
(17:27):
that's all right, Yeah, with the guy who keeps yelling
the other character's name about five hundred times in the
movie Cabin Cabin. And this was a sequel to nine
seven's Gore, which also had talents in it as well
as Oliver Read. I have not yet seen that Filiver read.
It looks fabulous. I'm waiting for for one of the
riffing services, riff Tracks or Mystery Sense Theater to finally
(17:51):
riff this film for me. Yeah, I just remember about
this movie. It's it's very it's like obviously like super sexist,
just woman hating off the chain and like really silly
fight scenes. Yeah. Well, my understanding of the book series
and I haven't and I haven't read them preaps. We
can hear from some listeners who have and have some
some feedback on them. Um, apparently they start out in
the again thirty four book series here, so they start
(18:12):
out a little more based in just sort of spaceship
and sword and sorcery, you know, kind of a John
Carter vibe to them, and then they increasingly get more
into the author's quote unquote sexual philosophy. Oh boy, um so,
I'm sure that's highly interesting. Now, another great example that
also has some mystery sense Theater three thousand, uh tie
(18:34):
in is uh my favorite Gammera movie, Gamera Versus Guron,
which features a counter earth named Tera, and it's home
to a humanoid species on the verge of extinction due
to NonStop Gaos attacks. Gaos being the sort of winged
shark creature that Gammera fights a lot with the sort
of radioactive bats that emit rays. Yeah, so this plant
(18:58):
has just been devastated by this because I guess they
don't have a Gamera. Uh, but they do have one
loan planetary guardian and it's the blade headed gear on
which if if you've ever seen a kaiju whose head
looks like just a giant blade and he's fighting Gamera,
that's him. Now, as with many of the verses things, here,
(19:18):
is it actually in the end of the movie Gammera
Versus Giron or do they team up? Oh? No, the
Guron is a total villain, So it's just a long
dooey fight between the two. Yeah. Now, what's the Godzilla
movie where aliens kidnapped Godzilla to bring him back to
their home planet to fight a monster that's attacking them. Who.
I don't remember that one. It sounds like it probably exists, though,
(19:42):
Is that Godzilla versus Monster Zero? Maybe? So I just
looked it up. Yes, I think that is it. I
don't think that took place on the counter Earth, though,
I think it's just another planet. Okay, we'll see some
other quick examples of of counter earths and fiction. Uh.
Britt Marling's Another Earth is a film that apparently explores this.
(20:02):
I haven't seen it, but I love her work on
The o A, the Netflix sci fi series. I haven't
seen it, it's good. Uh. Lars von Trier's Melancholia is
another film, another one I have not seen, which also
features a counter earth in some fashion, but I don't
I don't really watch films by that director, so I
can't speak to it. And then, of course, counter earths
(20:24):
pop up in various other sci fi properties of note,
many many a good deal better than what we've mentioned here.
But but hey, this is where you come in, the listener.
If you have a favorite counter earth or counter earth
treatment from science fiction, let us know. I would love
to hear from it. I always enjoy hearing, especially from
those of you who have really steeped in like seventies
and eighties sci fi uh novels, you know, can write
(20:47):
in and uh and and you and educate us on
what we're missing. All Right, we gotta take a quick break,
but we will be right back with more on lost planets. Alright,
we're back. What's our next destination, Joe, We've gotta be
turning in and turning down this. I want to get
on a hobby horse for a second. Okay. You know
that old expression that in space there is no up
(21:09):
or down. It's very It's like in the Wrath of Cohn, right,
you know, it's like con is thinking, is not thinking
three D enough, He's not thinking about space the right way. Uh.
And So it's technically advantageous to recognize when you're flying
around in the space there's no real top or bottom.
You can orient in any direction. And in a sense
that is true if we go into orbit around the Antikathon, say,
(21:31):
there's no reason to assume that the north pole of
Gore is up, in the south pole of Gore is down,
or vice versa. Right, and then as we've discussed before
in the show. You have more of an up and
down feel in Star Trek because it's basically a world
of ships, a world of seagoing vessels translated into a
space scenario. And then you have more recent models of
(21:52):
especially visual science fiction, such as the television series The Expanse,
which which demonstrates him more through readimensional realm of of
a cosmic military engagement. Exactly. Yeah, uh so, so it
is true that out here in space there's no ground
down beneath our feet. But in another sense, I think
(22:12):
that's really under selling how far down down goes, because
down means toward a center of gravity. That's how we
use it to mean, you know, down on Earth. And
the Solar System actually does have a bottom, and it's
about fifteen million degrees celsius. It's the core of the Sun,
the star I whose gaze you cannot hold without going blind.
(22:33):
That's all the way down in the Solar System. So
you're talking about just being if you were pulled down
the gravity well, as it's called, Yes, that's the bottom. Yeah,
straight down into the pit, straight into the open mouth
of autun And so I like thinking about it that way,
thinking about that as you get closer to the Sun,
you're actually going down into the pit. You're almost in
(22:53):
a way, going into the underworld. And so for literally
thousands of years we mentioned this earlier in the Episo so,
but since no later than the Babylonian astronomers of the
second millennium BC, humans have known about the first six planets.
You can see them with the naked eye. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter,
and Saturn. They're bright points of light passing and regressing
(23:16):
across the night sky. You don't need to telescope. Sometimes
we've watched them, we've charted their movement. And when Newton
came along, there was a revolution because we discovered the
laws that govern the way they move. And crucially, you know,
Newton came up with laws of motion that allowed us
to see that the same physical laws that controlled the
movements of the planets also controlled the movement of regular
(23:38):
objects here on Earth, whose things like gravity and momentum.
But now that we're out of the realm of saying
the ancient Greeks who were reasoning on the basis of
maybe something like Pythagorean symmetry or something like that, now
we've got real scientific tools under our belt that actually
help us learn what things are out there, and they
are good at producing accurate results. Could we use those
(24:01):
tools to see if there's something else out there that
we weren't seeing, And specifically, could we peer deep down
into the well, all the way down into the well
of the sun, to see if there's something in that
direction we're not seeing. So I wanna turn to my
man urbane. You know it's spelled urbane. That is not
the French way. I think it's our bond or bond.
(24:24):
Jean Joseph Laverier a French astronomer who lived eighteen eleven
to eighteen seventy seven, and in eighteen thirty seven Laverier
was appointed to a position at the Polytechnic School in Paris,
where he began a long study of the planet Mercury,
which is of course the innermost planet in the Solar
System that we know about now. It's the closest to
(24:44):
the Sun. And he was doing things like creating tables
of observation of the planet's orbit. And if that sounds
like boring work, you should know that there's a wrinkle here.
There's actually a mystery involved in Mercury's orbit. See, Mercury's
orbit is not what it should have been given the
planet's momentum and the gravitational influences on it that we
(25:06):
knew about. There's this phenomenon known as the precession of
the parahelion of Mercury. Real quick point. A parahelion is
the point of least distance from the Sun during an
object's orbit. Right, Yes, it's the point when it comes closest.
So essentially, the precession of the parahelion of Mercury means
that every year on Mercury, every time Mercury goes around
(25:29):
the Sun, its orbits sort of shifts forward. So if
you imagine getting up on the north pole of the
Sun and of Mercury and looking down at the solar plane,
um you're looking down at Mercury's path with a time
lapse tracing its movement across the years. It would not
repeat the same path every year, but instead it would
sort of shift forward a bit with every trip around
(25:52):
the Sun, drawing more kind of a daisy pedal or
spirograph type pattern. And the question is what caused this?
So fortunately the astronomers of the nineteenth century were armed
with that great investigative tool in the history of science.
The physics of Isaac Newton, and the physics of Isaac
Newton was extremely good at predicting the movements of a
(26:13):
planet by knowing it's inertia, the uniform motion of the
planet through space, and by knowing gravity the mutual attraction
to other centers of mass that were out there. And generally,
Newton's laws had proved really accurate, astonishingly good actually at
predicting planetary motion. And if you took into account all
the relevant influences, the physical influences we knew about, you
could just predict where the planets would go, except Mercury.
(26:37):
And so Newton's laws accounted for almost all of the
observed procession of the orbit of Mercury, but not quite all.
There's still just a bit of steady change in the
planet's orbit that stubbornly remained unexplained, making the orbit of
Mercury this stubborn and mysterious problem in Laverier's time. But
in eighteen forty five Laverier he's working on a different problem.
(27:00):
He changes his focus briefly to focus on the curious
case of another planet in the Solar System see uh
I mentioned earlier that we've known about the first six
planets in the Solar System since ancient times, but in
the nineteenth century astronomers were still dealing with a relatively
recent edition. And think about how weird this is, like
two at a time for the first time in thousands
of years that we knew about another planet, and that
(27:22):
planet was How do we say this planet's name on
the podcast Robert, do we just say Uranus? Well? Uranus
is fun? Is is more fun? It's more humorous. Um
I often I often say Uranus, though that almost sounds
like a uranist. Like uranist, it's a professional urinator in
many respects. It's an unfortunately named planet. Yeah, it maybe
(27:44):
could have been worse. I don't know if this would
be worse or not. So it was discovered in seventeen
eighty one Uranus. That was Uranus. Sorry, that was the
first time it was seen by a human and it
was by the German born British astronomer William Herschel, who
found the planet during a survey of the stars, and
he wanted to call it not Uranus or Uranus, but
(28:05):
Georgie um sidus or the star of George, after King
George the third of England. Uh, and I'm glad that
name got scrapped in in favor of a much more
dignified mythological anus reference. Yeah. Even even with the the
anus right in there, it it has more of a
ring to it than than this Georgia um citizen business. Well,
(28:26):
I mean, oh, how horrible that would be the name
of planet after just like a human king. Kings suck, Yes, absolutely,
I mean kings, they they have all these other things.
Let's at least leave their names off of the planet. Yeah,
stick to mythical references please. But anyway, like mercury, Uranus
was this kind of like spear mysterious, right. Uranus also
(28:46):
wobbled in its orbit. Its path around the Sun was
different from what we would predict given the gravitational influences
that we knew about. So Laverier took this mystery and
he turned it into one of the great success stories
in the history of any scientific theory. He conjured a
planet out of the void, and his assumptions were really simple.
(29:06):
So he took the known laws of physics, he took
Newton's laws, and he asked, you know, given these laws,
what could make Uranus orbit as irregular as we observe.
And the answer he came up with was, well, another
planet could do it. He calculated how big that other
planet would have to be and where exactly would have
to be in relation to Uranus, and then he put
(29:28):
that prediction to the test. He wrote down his predictions
in a letter to a German astronomer named Johann Ji
Gala and asked him to look for this eighth planet
with his instruments and using Laverier's predictions. Gala found the
planet Neptune after only about an hour of looking for it,
within one degree of exactly where Laverier had predicted. And
(29:50):
I should also just note that an English astronomer named
John c Adams also calculated the position of the planet
that would come to be known as Neptune independently around
the same time. But in both they're essentially using the
math to determine where this this unknown planet would be.
And then it is confirmed that there is of course
a planet there, and yeah, and this is like the
(30:10):
classic case of like when when a scientific theory works best, right,
when a scientific theory tells you how things work in
a way that allows you to extrapolate from what you know,
to what you predict you should find in the future,
and then you go out and look and find exactly Yeah,
you find exactly what you predicted. So this is like
(30:31):
a great win for Newton's theories. Right then the prediction
was a huge success. It led to Laverier being given
all kinds of medals and honorary appointments, and he was
eventually made the head of the Astronomical Observatory in Paris.
He had he had plucked Neptune out of space, armed
with nothing but the power of Newton's laws. And so
then after this, Laverier decides to go back to his
(30:52):
old subject. He turns his attention back to Mercury and
the problem of Mercuries or I think everybody can see
where we're going here, right, Yeah, So you can guess
what the temptation might be. Laverier had just achieved awesome
fame by predicting a previously undiscovered planet. What if there
was another? So he came up with a prediction for
(31:13):
something with mass very close to the Sun inside the
orbit of Mercury, maybe another asteroid belt or another planet.
It would be something with mass that that could cause
Mercury's orbit to wobble in the way he had measured
so precisely when making his tables. And then here's the
real kicker. Just like Neptune, this InterPlaNet was also discovered.
(31:37):
So here I want to rely on the work of
a of an author named Thomas Levinson from a book
called The Hunt for Vulcan from Random House in and
in an interview with nat Gio, Levinson describes the first
sighting of the planet at the bottom of the Pit,
which was by an amateur French astronomer named Edmund Modesta
(31:58):
Lescarbot on March eightifty nine. So you've got that he's
this country doctor. Uh, he was a country doctor by trade,
and he's got an observatory in a stone barn in
his backyard. Yeah, this is this is often the case
when we're talking about astronomy from this area. We're getting
into the realm of the gentleman scientist. Yes, yeah, he's
sort of like he dabbles. Maybe. So one day in
(32:20):
eighteen fifty nine, less Garbo took a break in between
seeing patients and he went out to his telescope to
observe the sun. And uh, and Levinson says, quote as
he trains his telescope on the Sun. He sees a
round object on the face of the Sun. He times
it as it moves steadily across the Sun, records the data.
(32:40):
Then another patient arrives, so he checks out that patient,
then comes back to the barn. This round dot is
still crossing the Sun. He tracks it continuously, taking notes
on its path until it finally goes over the other
edge of the Sun. And so, after making this observation
less Garbo, he reads about Laverier's prediction. He gets all
(33:00):
excited and he writes a letter to Laverier describing what
he saw crossing the disc of the Sun. So Laverier
had predicted this planet would be in there, and then
let's go Bo saw it. And apparently Laverier was at
a New Year's Eve party when he got the letter,
and he just left and he's like, oh boy, and
he went out to Lescarbo's house, which was a trip
that Levinson said involved a train ride in a twelve
(33:23):
mile walk. So he was obviously excited. I mean, you
find one planet, you kind of get hooked on it, right,
we got to find another. Um So lavery A confirmed
the observation, and this InterPlaNet got a name. It came
to be known as Vulcan. That's a good name because
Vulcan in in in the mythological sense is is close
to the forge. Yes, he's the forge, got exactly. He's
(33:45):
the Hifastus type figure. He's down there with the fires
beating the steel. And this triggered a period of what
Levinson called vulcan Mania. So suddenly astronomers all over the
world you're trying to find Vulcan, and quite a few
reported finding it, like during an eclipse in eight seventy eight.
Levinson tells the story that Thomas Edison happened to be
(34:05):
in the path of totality for a for a solar
eclipse in Wyoming, and he was there to try out
an infrared radiation sinsor he had created, which actually did
not work in the end. But so he's out there
for the eclipse and he ends up coming across a
pair of Vulcan hunters who were using the eclipse to
try to spot the planet, because obviously, if you think
about this, it's hard to see a planet that's close
(34:26):
to the Sun under normal circumstances. But if you wait
for a solar eclipse and the Moon blocks out the light,
of the Sun. Suddenly you can look up there and say, okay,
is there anything there? The two Vulcan hunters here in
the story where Simon Newcomb and James Craig Watson, and
the report goes that Newcomb could not find the planet.
He looked for Vulcan during the eclipse. He didn't see anything.
(34:47):
But Watson said he saw it. He said a star
was near the Sun which had never been documented before.
It was not on any of his charts, and it
had to be the planet Vulcan. In an article for Nautilus,
Levinson writes a about Watson, citing quote Watson saw very
close to the limb of the Sun, a ruddy star,
just where Vulcan ought to have been. So the discovery
(35:08):
of Vulcan was reported in the New York Times, in
papers around the world. It was huge and exciting news,
and there were even cases were like doubters and skeptics
about Vulcan were sort of pooh pooed and made fun of.
But if you know your solar system now you might
be wondering. Okay, so what happened? We didn't memorize that
one in school, right, So yeah, what happened to Vulcan
(35:29):
and Vulcan Mania. Well. Of course, many others simply failed
to find the planet. Other people looked for it and
never saw what the people who found it said they saw.
But what really killed it was a change in the
theoretical framework that had predicted it. That change was what
was brought about with Einstein in the theory of general relativity.
So when Einstein devised his theory, one of the key
(35:50):
elements is that space and time may have their geometry
altered by large amounts of mass and energy, and that
an object traveling close to a massive object like a
star would be effective by these deformations of spacetime. And
what Einstein found here was that his theory, when he
did the math, almost perfectly predicted the precession of the
(36:12):
parahelion of Mercury without invoking any elusive hidden planets. Reportedly,
you know, when Einstein made these calculations and discovered that
his theory had finally explained the leftover bits of Mercury's wobble,
he was so excited that he felt heart palpitations and
couldn't work for days, because here's this lingering mystery and astronomy.
It had led people to hypothesize phantom planets that weren't
(36:34):
actually there. And finally, just by re envisioning exactly how
gravity worked and what the shape of space time was,
he had explained it. Now with this new theory, it
matched all of the observations from the past. Like this
is like a Scooby Doo mystery, Like the ghost is
no longer required because because he has pulled the mask
off of the villain and exposed it. Yeah, Einstein, he
(36:57):
made a name for himself by killing a planet of
the Vulcan was dead. But I like to think about
and Levinson points out some stuff about this too, the
interesting fact that in a way Laverier was sort of
doing everything right right, you know. He was like, as
a scientist, he was like, Okay, well, I've got a
theory that I think works right. You know, you've got
Newtonian mechanics. They they have made correct predictions before, so
(37:20):
I'll use them to make a prediction again, and in
much the manner of predictions that have worked out in
the past. And then you go to the tests and say, okay,
does anybody empirically confirm what I predicted? And people did, Yeah,
I mean this is I mean getting it wrong too.
Is part of the process here. Uh, you form the
best hypothesis based on the materials you have to work with,
(37:42):
and then eventually you know it's going to be proven disproven,
or or or somewhere in between, tweaked to account for
new information about the world. I mean, I wonder what
was going on in the case of the people who
said that they saw vulcan Like were they I mean,
was it just the case that these were instances where
(38:04):
people did see something and they were just confused about
what it was. Or were they cases where people were
so excited to you know, want to see what they
were expecting to see that that it. You know, maybe
they wouldn't have seen something otherwise, but they just had
their their biases going. Oh. I think I think it
was all of those. I mean, we've talked about on
the show before, the enthusiasm around spying the canals of Mars,
(38:31):
you know, um, and and certainly that similar excitement involved there.
But in this case we're dealing with something that is
perhaps even less obvious to untrained eyes, perhaps just a
little easier to fool yourself on if you have just
just the right amount of enthusiasm, if you're gazing up
at at an eclipse like which, which even with appropriate
(38:54):
gear is is an overwhelming situation. Yeah, it's emotionally arousing. Yeah,
you might say, just a generally extreme proposition. Yes, And
and I'll advise, just in case we're not clear here,
do not listen to the show and go out and
stare at the sun looking for phantom planets? Right though,
I would advise you do visit a solar observatory. Absolutely, yes.
(39:15):
Should we take a break and then explore one last
lost daughter of Aten? Let's do it. Alright, we're back,
so we've cast Vulcan aside Vulcan. Vulcan's out, so dead,
So let's go through the planets. We have Wait a minute,
what about Antikathon always dead too, it's dead too. Central
Fire also gone. So we have Mercury, okay, Venus, Earth, Mars,
(39:37):
and then of course, oh okay, we'll see Did you
say Phaeton? I said Phaeton? What is Phaeton? All right? Yep?
This is the This, this is our next destination in
the podcast, named for the son of Helios and Greek myth,
and this was the This was for a brief period,
a hypothetical planet between Mars, and Jupiter. Now I know
(40:01):
that there is something between Mars and Jupiter. Well, yeah,
so we have the rubble of an asteroid belt between
Mars and the gas giant. So the hypothesis here, just
to get it out of the way right from the start,
is that the asteroid belt used to be a planet,
which we are going to call Phaeton. Okay, So it's
like in Star Wars, after the planet Alderan gets blown
(40:23):
up by the Death Stact and they arrive in the
Millennium Falcon and what's there a bunch of like rocks
floating around in space. That's sort of like the asteroid
belt after the planet Phaeton has been destroyed. Right, So
the basic idea here is Phaeton. The planet is gone
and all we have is is rubble. Now why name
it Phaeton? This is pretty fun too. That's because in mythology,
(40:47):
um Phaeton borrows his dad's sun chariot, He borrows the
chariot of Helios, and I just guess, guess, just goes
on a wild ride on this thing. It just totally
wipes out. So they're number of different paintings of him
falling off the chariot of the Sun, crashing the chariot
of the sun. Um. There's a there's one particular fresco
(41:09):
fresco um. This was done eight. This is not an
Internet humor thing, no, no, but it's like, yeah, it's
like a fresco and you're looking up and there is
a phaeton driving the chariot and he is, as you said,
you might say, straight porky pigging it. He's just he's
he's wearing robes and all at least on his torso,
(41:31):
and it's just naked button genitals hanging out. This is
absolutely the most prominent scrotum I have ever seen in
a Renaissance painting. So I don't know, maybe he wrecked
the chariot because he was wearing no pants. I don't know.
Maybe uh, maybe this is part of the accident, like
he's he's wiping out so bad that his pants are
just immediately vaporized. Well, no, I think what we need
(41:55):
to what we must accept is that actually this painting
by Dominico Riccio. I don't know if you said the
name that I didn't know. That's the painter here. This
painting here is anatomically correct. This is what a chariot
wreck would look like. For god wearing robes. We just
normally are coddled by painters who must represent the gods
(42:15):
in a tasteful pose. This is like the cinema verity
of Renaissance painting of of classical gods. So I highly
recommend looking it up if you get a chance. Um,
and maybe I'll include a link on the landing page
that though it will almost certainly not be the main
art for the episode. So so, anyway, I know what
everyone's thinking. Or sorry, Okay, I've got it. There's this
(42:36):
idea that what's the asteroid belt doing there? Okay, maybe
it used to be a planet, But the way we
actually get to the formation of this Phaeton hypothesis is
a lot more interesting than that. And it comes down
again to UH, to the math, to a mathematical model,
and then and then someone saying, well, what what should
(42:57):
go here? What would what would make this model work?
What would fill in the missing blank? While a planet?
Of course, so you're saying there's a mathematical UH prediction
or mathematical theory that otherwise holds true, that the predicted
other things accurately and would have predicted a planet where
the asteroid belt is right, and it all has to
(43:17):
do with what's known as uh the Titches Bode law.
This is a hypothesis of planetary sequence named for Johan
Daniel Tichus and Johan Alert Bode. The two Johan's Johan
and Johan and um this was now in the Yeah.
This was proposed by German astronomer Tithis in seventeen sixty
(43:38):
six and popularized by Bode in seventeen seventy two. And
and to explain what all this is about, let's consider
the sequence of planets again. This time you know what
we know Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Now considered
this sequence of numbers, Okay, zero, three, six, twelve, twenty four.
(44:00):
Each number after three is twice the previous number, So
zero and then three, and then we go to six,
then to twelve, and twenty four. Makes sense add four
to each of these numbers and then divide them by ten,
and the result is as follows. Zero point four, zero
(44:21):
point seven, one point zero, one point six, two point eight,
five point two, ten point zero. Six of these numbers
closely approximate the distances of our planets from the Sun
in astronomical units. Are a use to refresh one au
is the rough distance between the Earth and the Sun.
(44:44):
So point four a use mercury point seven, Venus one
Earth naturally one point six Mars two point eight. They're
not a planet, bunch of question marks. Five point two
is Jupiter and ten is Saturn. So what's going on
with two point eight? You're saying? Otherwise, the distance of
the planets from the Sun pretty closely followed this sequence
(45:08):
of numbers in an orderly way, right, the than the
planets known to exist at the time. And and so
m bode especially he said, he there's a quote from me.
He says, can one believe that the founder of the
universe had left this space empty? Right? How why would
he mess with us like that? Right? I mean, but
then I mean without invoking the almighty though, coming back
(45:29):
to just the pure math, you can see where they
would say, well, look this, this, this mathematical sequence lines
up otherwise perfectly with the with the distances of the planet.
So what's going on here? Yeah, you would have to
think if there if there were never a planet there,
that's just a really odd coincidence that all the other
planets line up so well, right, And the other important
(45:49):
fact here is that at this time, Uh, the asteroid
belt was not known, so it was just a blank spot.
They weren't even saying, oh, where there should be a
planet here, there's asteroid belt. No, they just appeared to
be nothing. Now I do wonder if even though they
didn't know about the asteroid belt, would they know about
some of the largest of the asteroids. Well, in eighteen
o one they began too, because that's when we discovered
(46:12):
the asteroid series and our understanding of the asteroid belt began.
And at first, Series alone seemed to be the answer, like,
surely this was the planet only. Series is not a
true planet. It's a minor planet or dwarf planet, depending
on how you want to classify it. It's the thirty
third largest known body in the Solar System, and the
asteroid belt itself contains various smaller minor planets and irregularly
(46:35):
shaped bodies. The total mass of these rocks, if you
were to try and as symbol them all into a planet,
into a phaeton, if you will, would be about four
percent of the Earth's moon and uh, and so you
know that's not quite a planet's worth. And then the
belt it's itself, we when we we know now that
it was it formed in the Solar nebula and would become, uh,
(46:58):
that would become the Solar System. But gravitational gravitational perturbations
from Jupiter prevented the lumps from a creating into a planet.
There was just too much orbital energy. But the idea
here that they had was that, okay, we're discovering all
these pieces. Maybe they are pieces of of of something else,
something that was there before. So Phaeton would have been
(47:21):
that planet and uh and it would have at some
point been destroyed, becoming the asteroid belt. And we got
to this point because in eighteen o two, German astronomer
Heinrich Wilhelm math house Olds proposed that these might be
the remains of a planet, and then linguist Johan goldleb
Ratloff proposed the name Phaeton. I mean, really he had
(47:42):
the easy part. He just came along and said, hey,
call it Phaeton. Maybe he was just a big fan
of that painting. Yeah, maybe so. And all of this
was in line with what would be known as disruption theory,
which was the idea that there was some former planet
here that was destroyed by Jupiter's gravity or a space
collision or manner of internal turmoil, or the effects of
(48:02):
some other hypothetical, hypothetical local cosmic body. But we know
now that no such planet never existed, or at least
the evidence is against it. The evidence is against it.
There was there, there doesn't seem to have ever been
something there to explode. Plus, UH, the the Titches Bode
law is now just considered a mathematical curiosity, and not
(48:24):
only because phaeton didn't work out. UH. It is interesting
that the sequence holds true for Uranus, which was discovered
later in seventeen eighty one. Wait are you are you
abandoning ground on Urinus again? Um? Well no, I could
just I mean, we're already talking about Phaeton um porky
picking it, So I guess we can. We can use Uranus.
(48:45):
The sequence holds true for Uranus as well, UH, discovered
in seventeen eighty one, UH at nineteen eight years. But
here's the thing. Neptune and then Pluto break the sequence.
So the sequence the law does not hold up to
the UH discovery of additional bodies in our solar system. Okay,
so our apologies to the two yo Han's, but again
(49:08):
they were doing exactly what one should do. They were looking,
they were looking at the at the data, they were
they were looking at the observations, and they were trying
to figure out what was going on, Why why is
the observable solar system not matching up with this mathematical
pattern that we have seen elsewhere. And then when they
begin to discover something in the exact place where something
(49:32):
should be to meet this sequence, I mean, that's compelling. Well,
I mean it's just a reminder that, of course, uh,
you know, even when you're sort of when you're sort
of like doing science right, like you're not out there
just proposing ancient aliens because it feels good or something like.
You know, you've got a theory that has a track
record of of correctly, uh predicting some things in the past,
(49:53):
so you're you're trying to extrapolate to the future. That
that's in a way how science usually works when it
works correct actually, but it can still lead you astray,
and you've always gotta you've always just got to return
to the well of empirical observation and keep trying to
figure things out and refining. You don't and you don't
want to be too married to the idea that you're
going to discover a planet, because then that can skew
your your observations and uh and just the the the
(50:17):
overall integrity of what you're trying to do. There's nothing
like the rush of discovering a planet. You you can
tell people they were just like chomping for it. Like
if if, for instance, if you were seeking to discover
a counter Earth because you believe that to be Hades,
you believed it to be uh, the nether realm, and
that discovering it would then prove something some religious model
(50:41):
that was important to you. Um, you know that that
that would be an example of of of over zealous exploration.
Like you're clearly you're uh, you know, the the the
exploration is out a whack at that point. That would
make for a pretty good sci fi story. I propose
a principle known as let's call it agents Razor, where
(51:02):
it is you do not needlessly multiply gores. Yes, if
your if your model of the Solar System can work
without the inclusion of a phantom planet, uh, then then
then that's the direction you should go in. But however,
is we're going to discuss in a future episode of
stuff to blow your mind. Uh, that's not quite it.
For phantom planets in our own solar system. There there
(51:24):
still remain uh uh you know, at least a one
or two that are still talked about. Oh, yes, shall
we return, Yes we should, but we'll leave those phantom
planets for next time. Okay, all right. Uh. In the meantime,
if you want to check out our homepage, it is
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership.
That's where we'll find all the episodes and also a
(51:45):
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(52:29):
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(52:52):
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