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

Athansius Kircher's fanciful imagining of Earth's interior from his work Mundus Subterraneus. In fairness, though, he'd never been to the center of the planet before, unlike Brendan Fraser in the 2008 film Journey to the End of an Actor's Career Center of the Earth. Source: Archive.org Kircher hadn’t a lick of data to back up his claims, but Halley sure did. As strange as it seems, his theory was wrong but well-reasoned given the scope of human knowledge at the time, and it often incorporated ideas from Principia, according to Griffin. Halley argued that the variations in Earth’s magnetic field couldn’t be due to some sort of magnetic body wandering around in rock, what with the rather solid nature of rock, so there must be unseen circles spinning around beneath our feet. “The Earth is represented by the outward Circle,” he wrote, “and the three inward Circles are made nearly proportionable to the Magnitudes of the Planets Venus, Mars, and Mercury, all which may be included within th ... Read full article.