The Dynamics of an Asteroid is a fictional book by Professor James Moriarty, the implacable foe of Sherlock Holmes. The only mention of it in Arthur Conan Doyle's original Holmes stories is in The Valley of Fear when Holmes says of Moriarty: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?