Category: Believed first, measured afterward

The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

• The age of the Earth – Kelvin cooled the planet from first principles and got twenty-four million years. His own former assistant had the right answer in 1895, and let it go.
• Dr. Ambrose Aird – Victorian gentleman-amateur (1809–1884) who revived Lorimer's abandoned method to prove the flat plane, and fitted it with a correction that could not fail.
• The Counter-Earth – A tenth planet, placed where nobody could see it. Nine bodies were visible, ten is the perfect number, and the Pythagoreans made up the difference.
• Curved visual space – The real finding that perceived space is not Euclidean: a fact about the observer, cited as one about the light, by papers that exempt the instrument.
• Heliocentrism – The Earth goes round the Sun: correct, and believed for very nearly three centuries before anyone could show it.
• Hollow Earth – A shell around a space, proposed by an Astronomer Royal because Newton had the Moon too heavy, and disproved by weighing a mountain in Perthshire.
• Lord Kelvin – Fixed the bottom of the temperature scale and the age of the Earth. He got one of them right, and never said the sentence he is famous for.
• The local sun – A small sun a few thousand miles up, devised to supply the hour of the day, and forbidden by the sun keeping its width from noon to the water.
• Moon – The Earth's satellite, and its measuring instrument: one face turned to us, and the wrong reading of its density once hollowed out the planet.
• N-rays – A radiation emitted by almost everything, reported in three hundred papers, and detected throughout by looking at a faint light and deciding it had brightened.
• Max Planck – Founded quantum theory by an assumption he called an act of despair, spent years trying to undo it, and wrote the standard account of why converts are slow.
• Stellar parallax – The annual shift demanded as proof of the Earth's motion in 1543, not found for 295 years, and there the whole time.
• The 21 grams experiment – A bed on beam scales and six dying patients. The number everyone knows comes from one of them, and reached print only because a newspaper got there first.
• Vulcan – A planet announced, named, decorated and assigned an orbit to the arcminute, between Mercury and the Sun, that was never there.

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