Many people think that scientific theories are always right and the people who came up with them are geniuses. But there have been many theories related to the sciences, including mathematics, that have been proven wrong over the years. Here are some of those more popular theories and why they were not correct.
Planet Vulcan
The great mathematician – Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier – was the first person to speculate and theorize on the existence of Planet Vulcan. He and others could not explain some of the things that were occurring with the orbit of Mercury and they theorized that some object must be causing the unexplainable oddities. Le Verrier determined that another planet – Planet Vulcan – must be the culprit. Many people reported sightings of this planet and he was still regarded as the founder of Planet Vulcan when he died in 1877.
But Einstein’s Theory of Relativity explained what Le Verrier and his cohorts were trying to explain. Soon after, the idea of a Planet Vulcan was disregarded by the scientific and mathematical community. There are still some – as late as 1970 – who claim to see a planet orbiting around Mercury. But according to evidence, it simply doesn’t exist.
Ever-Growing Earth
There was a time when the scientific community believed that the earth was always increasing in volume. They used this theory to explain things like continental drifts and underwater mountain ranges. They stated that this was the only plausible theory for why continent would drift further apart and how new mountains are formed. Both Tesla and Darwin played with this theory, but they eventually decided that it wasn’t correct.
Today, scientists attribute the continental drifts and other phenomena to the movement of tectonic plates. Although the expanding earth theory has never been disproven, the focus is now on how the movement of tectonic plates converge under the surface of the Earth to create oceans and mountains and other phenomena.