Posted: Jun 23, 2017 6:28 pm
Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) was a Freudian psychoanalyst who became a cosmic catastrophist. After around a decade of research, he came out with his magnum opus, Worlds in Collision. That book proposed a dramatic revision of the recent history of the Solar System, "recent" being the last few thousand years. He proposed that the Solar System suffered some big catastrophes that were remembered in a large number of myths and legends.
The planet Jupiter ejected a giant comet, an event that was remembered as Athena being born from Zeus's head. The comet then had some near-collisions with the Earth, doing such things as the Ten Plagues of Egypt, parting the Red Sea for Moses, raining down hydrocarbons and carbohydrates such as manna, and stopping the Earth's rotation so that Joshua could win one of his battles. This comet then almost-collided with Mars and settled down in its present orbit as the planet Venus. Mars in turn did some near-collisions with the Earth before settling down.
When astronomers learned of this book, they were furious, and they boycotted his publisher, Macmillan. That publisher had a sizable textbook department, so they dropped the book. Doubleday accepted the book, and it was much less vulnerable to such boycotts. Ever since, IV's defenders have considered him a martyr because of that.
Spacecraft exploration of the Solar System was underway by the 1960's, with spacecraft returning some startling observations and measurements. IV and his followers claimed that these results were a complete vindication of Worlds in Collision. In 1974, the American Association for the Advancement of Science had a conference on IV's ideas, and Carl Sagan contributed a lengthy analysis of WiC. In his research, he discussed the book with a leading professor of Semitic literatures, and while that professor considered IV's discussions of those literatures to be nonsense, he was impressed by the book's astronomy. CS had the opposite impression.
That is a problem with evaluating IV's writing. It seems very impressive, except when it is about something that one knows something about. Then it's nonsensical.
IV went on to write some other books, like Ages and Chaos, featuring a big revision in New-Kingdom Egyptian chronology, and Earth in Upheaval, where he tried to revive early 19th cy. catastrophist geology. The geologists who advocated such catastrophes were old-earthers who believed that the Earth had suffered several catastrophes, with Noah's Flood being its most recent catastrophe. But from around 1850 to around 1950, catastrophism had a bad reputation among geologists, and they preferred uniformitarian hypotheses, extrapolation from the present day while avoiding catastrophes much larger than any well-documented ones. Catastrophism has made a comeback over the last half-century, though it coexists with such uniformitarianism as continental drift. This is in part due to improved ability to test hypotheses of large catastrophes, like impacts of small asteroids. In fact, the current favorite theory of the origin of the Moon is very Velikovskian: a Mars-sized object hitting the Earth and some of the splatter going into orbit and condensing to form the Moon. Part of the testing of that hypothesis is doing simulated collisions and watching what happens in them.
Carl Sagan concluded that where IV was right, he was almost certainly not original, and that where IV was original, he was almost certainly not right. Also, as CS noted, there is much in IV's work that is neither right nor original, like his cosmic catastrophism. William Whiston, Ignatius Donnelly, and Hanns Hoerbiger had proposed similar sorts of theories before him, but he barely mentioned them.
It's hard to find Velikovsky defenders these days -- could Velikovskyism be going the way of Hoerbigerism, becoming a historical curiosity?
The planet Jupiter ejected a giant comet, an event that was remembered as Athena being born from Zeus's head. The comet then had some near-collisions with the Earth, doing such things as the Ten Plagues of Egypt, parting the Red Sea for Moses, raining down hydrocarbons and carbohydrates such as manna, and stopping the Earth's rotation so that Joshua could win one of his battles. This comet then almost-collided with Mars and settled down in its present orbit as the planet Venus. Mars in turn did some near-collisions with the Earth before settling down.
When astronomers learned of this book, they were furious, and they boycotted his publisher, Macmillan. That publisher had a sizable textbook department, so they dropped the book. Doubleday accepted the book, and it was much less vulnerable to such boycotts. Ever since, IV's defenders have considered him a martyr because of that.
Spacecraft exploration of the Solar System was underway by the 1960's, with spacecraft returning some startling observations and measurements. IV and his followers claimed that these results were a complete vindication of Worlds in Collision. In 1974, the American Association for the Advancement of Science had a conference on IV's ideas, and Carl Sagan contributed a lengthy analysis of WiC. In his research, he discussed the book with a leading professor of Semitic literatures, and while that professor considered IV's discussions of those literatures to be nonsense, he was impressed by the book's astronomy. CS had the opposite impression.
That is a problem with evaluating IV's writing. It seems very impressive, except when it is about something that one knows something about. Then it's nonsensical.
IV went on to write some other books, like Ages and Chaos, featuring a big revision in New-Kingdom Egyptian chronology, and Earth in Upheaval, where he tried to revive early 19th cy. catastrophist geology. The geologists who advocated such catastrophes were old-earthers who believed that the Earth had suffered several catastrophes, with Noah's Flood being its most recent catastrophe. But from around 1850 to around 1950, catastrophism had a bad reputation among geologists, and they preferred uniformitarian hypotheses, extrapolation from the present day while avoiding catastrophes much larger than any well-documented ones. Catastrophism has made a comeback over the last half-century, though it coexists with such uniformitarianism as continental drift. This is in part due to improved ability to test hypotheses of large catastrophes, like impacts of small asteroids. In fact, the current favorite theory of the origin of the Moon is very Velikovskian: a Mars-sized object hitting the Earth and some of the splatter going into orbit and condensing to form the Moon. Part of the testing of that hypothesis is doing simulated collisions and watching what happens in them.
Carl Sagan concluded that where IV was right, he was almost certainly not original, and that where IV was original, he was almost certainly not right. Also, as CS noted, there is much in IV's work that is neither right nor original, like his cosmic catastrophism. William Whiston, Ignatius Donnelly, and Hanns Hoerbiger had proposed similar sorts of theories before him, but he barely mentioned them.
It's hard to find Velikovsky defenders these days -- could Velikovskyism be going the way of Hoerbigerism, becoming a historical curiosity?