The Dynamics of an Asteroid
Fictional book by Sherlock Holmes's nemesis, mentioned only once.
The Dynamics of an Asteroid is a fictional book by Professor James Moriarty, the antagonist of Sherlock Holmes. It is mentioned only in Arthur Conan Doyle's story The Valley of Fear, where Holmes refers to it. Participants in the Sherlockian game have elaborated on details about the book beyond Doyle's original mention.
Quick Facts
- Author
- Professor James Moriarty
- Type
- Fictional book
- First mentioned in
- The Valley of Fear (1914, set in 1888)
- Related real author
- Carl Friedrich Gauss
- Related real work
- Gauss's 1809 treatise on the dynamics of Ceres
Facts from the source article.
Related real works
Carl Friedrich Gauss wrote a groundbreaking treatise on the dynamics of the asteroid Ceres in 1809, a method still in use. The Canadian-American astronomer Simon Newcomb, known for his spiteful nature, published series on planetary motions two decades before Doyle's writing and may have inspired Moriarty. Henri Poincaré's 1887 submission to King Oscar II of Sweden's celestial mechanics contest examined the three-body problem, a theoretical basis for asteroid dynamics; the submission contained a fatal error missed by both the jury and Poincaré, later corrected.
Srinivasa Ramanujan's 1913 letters to Cambridge mathematicians were so abstruse that only G. H. Hardy recognized their merit, with Hardy and J. E. Littlewood stating many defeated them completely; the last sub-field and problem of that work have been called The Final Problem, referencing the Holmes story. Holmes's statement that no one in the scientific press could criticize Moriarty's work is qualified by the phrase it is said. Arthur Eddington, when told he was one of three people understanding Einstein's relativity, quipped he could not think who the third was.
Discussion of possible book contents
Doyle gave no indication of the book's contents beyond its title. Later speculation includes Isaac Asimov's short story The Ultimate Crime, Robert Bloch's The Dynamics of an Asteroid, and William Barton and Michael Capobianco's The Adventure of the Russian Grave. In Adam-Troy Castro's novel Spider-Man: The Revenge of the Sinister Six, the work is referenced as the authority on orbital bombardment. Physicist Alejandro Jenkins suggested in 2013 that the book might involve chaos theory, whose link to asteroid dynamics was not appreciated until Poincaré's 1890 work.
Simon P. Norton and Alain Goriely each proposed the book could have been Moriarty's entry to the 1887 celestial mechanics contest won by Poincaré. In the BBC series Sherlock, Sherlock's mother M.L. Holmes wrote The Dynamics of Combustion, referencing this book. The CBS series Elementary featured a fictional paper titled Miscalculating Near-Earth Asteroids and the Threat to Human Existence in its 100th episode. Kim Newman's pastiche novel includes a chapter where a former student of Moriarty publicly criticizes The Dynamics of an Asteroid, prompting Moriarty to drive him insane by simulating Martian contact.
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