The Dynamics of an Asteroid

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The cover of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, from the 2011 film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. The Dynamics of An Asteroid.jpg
The cover of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, from the 2011 film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows .

The Dynamics of an Asteroid is a fictional book by Professor James Moriarty, the implacable foe of Sherlock Holmes. The only mention of it in Arthur Conan Doyle's original Holmes stories is in The Valley of Fear (written in 1914, but set in 1888) when Holmes says of Moriarty: [1]

Contents

Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it?

Participants in the "Sherlockian game", where Sherlock Holmes fans elaborate on elements within Doyle's stories, have suggested other details about The Dynamics of an Asteroid.

In 1809, Carl Friedrich Gauss wrote a ground-breaking treatise [2] on the dynamics of an asteroid (Ceres). However, Gauss's method was understood immediately and is still used today. [3]

Two decades before Arthur Conan Doyle's writing, the Canadian-American dynamic astronomer Simon Newcomb had published a series of books analyzing motions of planets in the solar system. [4] The notoriously spiteful Newcomb could have been an inspiration for Professor Moriarty. [5]

An example of mathematics too abstruse to be criticized is the letters of Srinivasa Ramanujan, sent to several mathematicians at the University of Cambridge in 1913. [6] Only one of these mathematicians, G. H. Hardy, even recognized their merit. Despite being experts in the branches of mathematics used, he and J. E. Littlewood added that many of them "defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before." It has taken over a century for this work to be understood; the last sub-field [7] (and the last problem of the last sub-field [8] ) have been referred to as The Final Problem in explicit reference to the Sherlock Holmes story. Holmes only states that "it is said" (emphasis added) that no one in the scientific press was capable of criticizing Moriarty's work; he stops short of recognizing the claim as indisputably accurate.

Similarly, when it was jocularly suggested to Arthur Eddington in 1919 that he was one of only three people in the world who understood Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, Eddington quipped that he could not think who the third person was. [9]

Discussion of possible book contents

Doyle provided no indication of the contents of Dynamics other than its title. Speculation about its contents published by later authors includes:

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References

  1. ↑ Doyle, Arthur Conan (1929). The Complete Sherlock Holmes Long Stories. London, UK: Murray. p. 409. ISBN   978-0-7195-0356-6.
  2. ↑ Gauss, C.F. (1809). Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientium. Hamburg, Germany: Friedrich Perthes and I.H. Besser – via Google Books.
  3. ↑ Teets, Donald; Whitehead, Karen (April 1999). "The discovery of Ceres: How Gauss became famous". Mathematics Magazine. 72 (2): 83–93. doi:10.1080/0025570X.1999.11996710. JSTOR   2690592.
  4. ↑ Marsden, B. (1981). "Newcomb, Simon". In Gillespie, C.C. (ed.). Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol. 10. New York, NY: Charles Screibner's Sons. pp. 33–36. ISBN   0-684-16970-3.
  5. ↑ Schaefer, B.E. (1993). "Sherlock Holmes and some astronomical connections". Journal of the British Astronomical Association. 103 (1): 30–34. Bibcode:1993JBAA..103...30S.
  6. ↑ Kanigel, R. (1991). The Man Who Knew Infinity: A life of the genius Ramanujan. Scribner. p. 168. ISBN   978-0-671-75061-9.
  7. ↑ Watson, G. N. (2001). "The final problem: an account of the mock theta functions". Ramanujan: essays and surveys. pp. 325–34.
  8. ↑ Berndt, Bruce C., Junxian Li, and Alexandru Zaharescu (2019). "The final problem: an identity from Ramanujan's lost notebook". Journal of the London Mathematical Society. 100 n (2): 568–591.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  9. ↑ Chandrasekhar, S. (1976). "Verifying the Theory of Relativity". Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. 30 (2): 255. ISSN   0035-9149. JSTOR   531756.
  10. ↑ Asimov, I. (1976). More Tales of the Black Widowers. Doubleday. ISBN   978-0-385-11176-8.
  11. ↑ Asimov, I.; Waugh, C.G. (1985). Sherlock Holmes through Time and Space. UK: Severn House. pp. 339–355. ISBN   978-0-312-94400-1.
  12. ↑ Kaye, Marvin, ed. (1994). The Game is Afoot . USA: St Martin's Press. pp.  488–493. ISBN   978-0-312-11797-9.
  13. ↑ Resnick, Mike; Greenberg, Martin H., eds. (1997). Sherlock Holmes in Orbit. Fine Communications. ISBN   978-0-886-77636-7.
  14. ↑ Jenkins, Alejandro (2013). "On the title of Moriarty's 'Dynamics of an asteroid' ". arXiv: 1302.5855 [physics.pop-ph].
  15. ↑ Poincaré, Jules Henri (1890). "Sur le problème des trois corps et les équations de la dynamique. Divergence des séries de M. Lindstedt". Acta Mathematica. 13 (1–2): 1–270. doi: 10.1007/BF02392506 .
  16. ↑ Diacu, Florin; Holmes, Philip (1996). Celestial Encounters: The origins of chaos and stability. Princeton University Press.
  17. ↑ "Sherlock Holmes and the Three-Body Problem". Mathematics Today. Institute of Mathematics & its applications. February 2014. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.672.4223 .
  18. ↑ Alain Goriely and Derek E. Moulton (April 2012). "The Mathematics Behind Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows" (PDF). SIAM News. Vol. 45, no. 3. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
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