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planet. It sounds completely bonkers and modern science will tell you it’s impossible. Johannes Kepler’s second law teaches us that a planet revolves faster when it is closer to the Sun, so logically if a Counter-Earth was to exist and followed the same orbit as our Earth, it would be visible at specific points of the year. What’s more, we’d actually feel the gravitational influence imposed by a CounterEarth. Hundreds of space probes and missions to the Moon would have been thrown into disarray, as the mathematics required to get them there would have been missing an unknown variable. It’s with a heavy heart that science is forced to conclude that there is no mysterious planet lurking beyond the sun.
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And yet the late Harvard philosopher George Bosworth Burch argued differently; or at least offered a last line of defence for the Greeks’ thinking. ‘The theory of the Counter-Earth is far from unintelligible or whimsical,’ explained Burch in a 1954 paper. ‘This thought cannot be expressed in terms of modern mechanics, because modern mechanics does not have the concept of a centre of space. But Philolaus’ mechanics did.’ Burch resurrected the reputation of the Counter-Earth theory. Sure, it may look stupid now, but it was at the cutting edge of maths and philosophy in its day
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