Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 14 -- Hollow Earth Geophysics
Bathed in perpetual light from a luminous gaseous
atmosphere that filled the inner spaces, each sphere "might
support life." Halley even entertained the possibility of "more
ample creation" within the earth, which might include suns.
Surely God would provide no less for his creatures. In the
very year that Halley’s essay was published, Robert Boyle
initiated a lecture series dedicated to the scientific proof of
Christianity. As Halley had recently been charged with
“atheism” -- a term holding different connotations than it does
today -- the nod to the Almighty may have been politically
astute.
Halley at 80, holding a drawing of his hollow earth.
Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler (1707-1783) speculated about a
hollow earth in 1767, proposing a thought experiment in which at the
earth's center lies a glowing core which serves as a miniature sun for
interior inhabitants.
It's unlikely that Euler believed any such thing, but subsequent public
perception often differs from individual initial intent.
John Leslie (1766-1832) wrote “The Philosophy of Arithmetic,”
but is best known for his research on heat and is considered to
be the first scientist to properly describe capilarity -- a
geophysical mechanism we saw much abused in Chapter 10.
Every genius has his or her shortcomings, Leslie's being a
theory of compressible bodies holding that density to be a
function of both a substance's particular elastic properties and
its distance from earth’s center. Material at the earth’s core
would be thousands of times more massive than that allowed
by Newtonian physics.
To make the math work, Leslie proposed in Elements of Natural
Philosophy (1829) that, “Our planet, must have a very widely cavernous
structure,” and “we tread on a crust or shell whose thickness bears but a
very small proportion to the diameter of its sphere.” As nothing can be
stationary, a single interior star couldn't be the source, but binary stars
(which he named Pluto and Proserpine) resolved that problem.
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