Predictions in Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a well-known tale. Readers often miss a very significant and curious aspect of this story. And that was that it predicted some astronomical facts which were far ahead of its time.
When Gulliver reached Liliputa, the astronomers of that country mentioned that the planet Mars has two moons. In the story, these two moons were described as very small, and orbiting quite close to the planet. The smaller one completed its orbit in ten hours, while the other took 29.5 hours.
Of course, at the time when Swift wrote the book, no one even knew that Mars has, indeed, two moons. In fact, they are so small that one cannot see them from the naked eyes. It took astronomers in ordinary reality 150 years to discover the two moons of Mars, and the remarkable coincidence: they complete their orbits around the planet every eight and thirty hours - remarkable near to the figures given in the story!
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