I am currently running a Victorian Scientific
Romance, which will be using the Castle Falkenstein world,
but will be playing down the High Fantasy elements.
One of the things that is central to the story is
weird science in general, and eventually, the theories
of a hollow earth. I would appreciate hearing what,
if any, thoughts on the matter you may
have.<br><br>I, personally, was tickled pink to find in my
researches that Edmund Halley (of comet fame) was one
earliest to propose a Hollow Earth theory.<br><br>Halley
was fascinated by the earth's magnetic field. He
noticed the direction of the field varied slightly over
time and the only way he could account for this was
there existed not one, but several, magnetic fields.
Halley came to believe that the Earth was hollow and
within it was a second sphere with another field. In
fact, to account for all the variations in the field,
Halley finally proposed that the Earth was composed of
some four spheres, each nestled inside another.
<br><br>Halley also suggested that the interior of the Earth was
populated with life and lit by a luminous atmosphere. He
thought the aurora borealis, or northern lights, was
caused by the escape of this gas through a thin crust at
the poles. <br><br>Others picked up Halley's
hollow-earth theory often adding their own twists. In the
eighteen century Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician,
replaced the multiple spheres theory with a single hollow
sphere which contained a sun 600 miles wide that
provided heat and light for an advanced civilization that
lived there. Later Scottish mathematician Sir John
Leslie proposed there were two inside suns (which he
named Pluto and Proserpine). <br><br>One of the most
ardent supporters of hollow-earth was the American John
Symmes. Symmes was an ex-army officer and a business man.
Symmes believed that the Earth was hollow and at the
north and south poles there were entrances, 4,000 and
6,000 miles wide, respectively, that led to the
interior. Symmes dedicated much of his life to advancing
his theory and raising money to support an expedition
to the North Pole for the purpose of exploring the
inner earth. He was never successful, but after his
death one of his followers, a newspaper editor named
Jeremiah Reynolds, helped influence the U.S. government to
send an expedition to Antarctica in 1838. While the
explorers found no hole there, they did bring back
convincing evidence that Antarctica was not just a polar ice
cap, but the Earth's seventh continent. <br><br>In
1846 the discovery of an extinct woolly mammoth frozen
in ice in Siberia was used by Marshall Gardner as
evidence of a hollow earth. Gardner subscribed to the
single-sun-inside-the-earth theory and suggested that the mammoth was so
well-preserved because it had died recently. Gardner thought
that mammoths and other extinct creatures wandered
freely in the interior of the earth. This one had
wandered outside by using the hole at the North Pole, then
was frozen and carried to Siberia on an ice flow.