The Dynamics of an Asteroid

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The Dynamics of An Asteroid is a fictional book by Professor James Moriarty, the implacable foe of Sherlock Holmes. The book is described by author Arthur Conan Doyle in The Valley of Fear (written in 1914, but set in 1888) when Sherlock Holmes, speaking of Professor Moriarty, states

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?^[1]

It might seem fantastic, or at least a wild exaggeration, to ascribe to one man mathematics so advanced that the experts could not even understand it well enough to criticize it, much less invent it themselves. But this is exactly what happened in 1913 when the then unknown Srinivasa Ramanujan wrote a letter containing some of his results to G. H. Hardy. Hardy and his colleague J.E. Littlewood said of these results, “not one could have been set in the most advanced mathematical examination in the world.” Although Hardy was one of the pre-eminent mathematicians of the day and an expert in several of the fields Ramanujan wrote about, he added that many of them "defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before." Also note that mathematicians of this era had no trouble criticizing other works on the same topic. In particular, Carl Friedrich Gauss wrote a ground breaking treatise on the dynamics of an asteroid (1 Ceres), and it was understood immediately (and his method is still used today). With this class of talent, Professor Moriarty evoked the profound respect of Sherlock Holmes, one of the few opponents to do so (Irene Adler being another.)

Doyle also portrayed Professor Moriarty as the author of A Treatise on the Binomial Theorem, written when he was only 21 years of age. In addition to being a completely different topic, it must have been quite a bit more accessible, since it got him a position as a chair of mathematics at a provincial university.

[edit] Discussion of possible book contents

Doyle provided no evidence relating to the contents of Dynamics. This has in no way prevented people from speculating about what it contained. Here are a few essays on this topic by some famous authors, and a list of many more references:

"The Ultimate Crime", short story by Isaac Asimov, in Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space, Severn House (UK), 1985. pp.339-355. ISBN 0-312-94400-4

"The Dynamics of An Asteroid", short story by Robert Bloch, The Baker Street Journal, 1953 (Also found in Marvin Kaye (ed.), The Game Is Afoot, St Martin's Press (USA), 1994. pp.488-493 ISBN 0-312-11797-3)

List of many references to Dynamics, as well as other works of Moriarty, Holmes, and others.

In the novel Spider-Man: The Revenge of the Sinister Six, by Adam-Troy Castro, a veiled reference is made to Moriarty and his Dynamics. Here the work is said to still be the authority on orbital bombardment.

[edit] Citation analysis

Citation analysis, which involves examining an item's referring documents, is used in searching for materials and analyzing their merit. (From the Wikipedia page on the subject.) Since citation analysis does not look at a document's contents, only references to it, it can be applied to a documents such as Dynamics or Treatise that do not in fact exist.

Dynamics is referenced in the professional scientific literature^[2] and in textbooks^[3].

The list in the previous section shows 42 references to Dynamics and 27 to Treatise, which are a lower limit, since the list is not up to date. An online search, as of 2005, for these titles with author Moriarty, reveals 263 references to Dynamics and 209 to Treatise. These are excellent numbers for any scientific paper, where the overall average is about 6 references. They are even better when compared to other papers from the same era - by 1900, the Royal Society's Catalog of Scientific Papers already listed 800,000 papers from 3000 journals.^[4] Most of these have been forgotten, and only a few are still referenced today, as shown by analyses of references to old scientific articles.^[5] The Dynamics of An Asteroid is among the select group of Victorian scientific works that are still remembered, and referenced, even today, despite the fact it does not exist.