Five SF Novels Inspired by Disproven Scientific Theories

[james_davis_nicoll]

Plenty of exciting hypotheses eventually fall out of scientific favor — but not before they've found their way into science fiction!

Five SF Novels Inspired by Disproven Scientific Theories

Comments

[davidgoldfarb]

In a sense Kepler was right: as I understand it, the so-called asteroid belt is thought to be planetesimals that were kept from coalescing into an actual planet by gravitational effects of Jupiter.

[ba_munronoe]

There probably isn't enough matter there: the total mass of the asteroid belt is only about 3-4% of the Moon, if the internet isn't lying to me.

[(Anonymous)]

From memory of a scholarly article several years ago, there was probably a lot more mass there to start with. Solar system building simulations tend to have several up to Luna size bodies form in the asteroid belt region which then either collide with each other starting the process all over again, or narrowly miss each other and get thrown into a Jupiter encounter which ejects them from the solar system entirely. I think it's 50-50 whether one of them wins out or we get the Ceres and rubble situation we see today.

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

I'd never heard of the 'Wandering Jupiter' aka the Grand Tack hypothesis until a few months ago. If anything like it is true, there could have been planets or planetisimals of substantial mass between Mars and Jupyter. But this would been coeval or even slightly prior to the formation of Earth (turns out the inner four were formed after five and up.) Oh, the things you learn.