An example of an alternative conception in a scientist's writing:
"Whether we use a compass to find our way across the open moors, the desert, or the trackless ocean, we are making practical use of the boiling of metals that goes on ceaselessly inside the core of the earth…
Below a thin fringe of atmosphere, it is probable that in each of these planets [Jupiter, Saturn Uranus, Neptune] there are thick shells of helium and hydrogen overlying an inner ball of rock.The hydrogen is not gaseous like the ordinary hydrogen of a chemist's laboratory, but is probably liquid and it acts like a metal. This liquid metallic hydrogen is also probably boiling like the metals in the core of the Earth, and as in the Earth it probably generates a magnetic field."
Fred Hoyle (1960) The Nature of the Universe (Revised ed.), 1960
I noticed this in Hoyle's book, and was surprised that a distinguished scientist would make such an error. Scientists consider the earth's magnetic field us due to motion within the liquid outer core. (No boiling involved.)
I wondered if this had been the understanding at the time he was writing, but not so:
"The modern view of the origin of the geomagnetic field associates it with motions in the liquid core of the Earth."
Runcorn, S. K. (1954), The Earth's core, Eos: Transactions American Geophysical Union, 35(1), 49-78, doi:10.1029/TR035i001p00049.
It is possible Hoyle was using 'boiling' as a metaphor for 'circulating', but this seems unlikely, as he repeated the point.
The temperature of the core is believed to be significantly above the familiar boiling temperatures of the metals, iron and nickel, it is thought to be composed of. But that is the boiling temperature at the surface of the earth under atmospheric pressure. The high pressures in the core are such that the boiling temperature under those conditions would be much higher (it is the high pressure that leads to hydrogen being metallic in the cores of giant planets).
It seems even famous scientists can have misconceptions.
Read about the nature of alternative conceptions
Read about some examples of science misconceptions
Read about historical scientific conceptions
