For roughly two decades (1860s-1880s), most scientists believed in Vulcan—a planet supposedly orbiting between Mercury and the Sun. They needed it to exist because Mercury’s orbit didn’t match predictions from Newtonian physics. Rather than question their framework, they invented a planet.
The problem wasn’t the scientists—it was incomplete information. They were working with the best model available and trying to fit observations into it. When Einstein’s general relativity solved the orbital discrepancies in 1915, Vulcan vanished from scientific consensus overnight.
Connections
Reference
� Journey to the Invisible Planet