Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

According to Velikovsky, these dramatic events happened well within the period of recorded history. So why is there no written record of any of these events? The events were so traumatic that they resulted in worldwide amnesia. This prevented any clear statement of what happened from being written down. The events are, however, to be found recorded in symbolic form in myths and legends.

A bit of reflection on the ideas outlined above will suggest to the reader that Velikovsky was one of the greatest crackpots of the twentieth century. When I teach a course on pseudoscience at Pace University, the common response is, “Why bother with this? No one could ever really have taken such nonsense seriously.” But Velikovsky’s ideas were taken seriously—very seriously—by many people when his books were first published. The ideas still have a small band of dedicated followers.

Why did such patently absurd beliefs achieve such acceptance? One clue comes from an examination of where Velikovsky’s ideas found initial support. Worlds in Collision received surprisingly favorable reviews in Harper’s and other literary magazines. These were magazines written for intelligent readers, but readers who had no scientific background. The magazine reviewers were apparently impressed with the symbolic interpretation of myths and legends that was one of Velikovsky’s strengths. They were largely unaware that symbolic interpretations of anything—literature, dreams, myths, or legends—are almost entirely subjective and do not constitute acceptable evidence for anything. The readers of these magazines were also largely ignorant of scientific matters. They were impressed by Velikovsky’s scientific jargon, but couldn’t spot it for the gibberish that it was. It should be remembered in this regard that in the early 1950s general scientific education in the schools was much more primitive than in the 1960s during the post- Sputnik era. Finally, there was little popular interest in space and astronomical topics then, as opposed to the period since the development of the space program. Thus, the public in general was less well-informed in areas that would enable people to see through Velikovsky’s claims.

The response of the scientific community to Velikovsky was, as might be expected, one of scorn and hostility. Worlds in Collision was first published by Macmillan, a company that also published many science textbooks. College professors threatened to stop using Macmillan textbooks if the publisher continued to print Velikovsky’s book. The pressure was so great that Macmillan sold the book to another publisher. This enabled Velikovsky to paint himself as a martyr whose ideas the scientific establishment had tried to suppress. This further endeared him to the literati, who were probably already somewhat hostile to the scientific community, which was becoming a more dominant and controlling force in society.

Velikovsky’s ideas and the evidence he and his followers say supports those ideas have been examined in detail elsewhere (Sagan 1981; Goldsmith 1977; Stiebing 1984), and the interested reader is referred to these sources for further discussion. The following pages will briefly analyze Velikovsky’s ideas and point out some of the major flaws, incorrect statements, and misinterpretations to be found.

Velikovsky says Venus is a recent addition to the solar system and that it first appeared about 1500 B.C.E. If this is true, then there should be no written record of the planet before that time. Huber (1977) has examined ancient records and found that Venus was mentioned as the morning and evening star by at least 1900 B.C.E. Sumerian tablets speak of a goddess or star manna as the morning and evening star. Venus was observed and worshipped in Babylon in the sixteenth century B.C.E. and, as Huber notes, the observations show that it was in its present orbital position at that time and that it stayed in that position. There is no mention of any wandering about, as Velikovsky claims.

Of course, records of such wandering-about might be missing due to Velikovsky’s hypothesized worldwide amnesia. This is obviously an irrefutable hypothesis and, in any case, does not explain why we find records of Venus before Velikovsky says it existed.

Sagan (1981) has discussed in detail the astrophysical problems with Velikovsky’s theories. Velikovsky says that Venus was ejected as a comet by Jupiter. How? What was the power source? None is ever specified by Velikovsky. The event just “happened.” But, if it happened, Venus would have had to be moving fast enough to escape from Jupiter’s massive gravitational pull. In other words, Venus would have had to reach escape velocity. But Venus is very massive, and the amount of energy needed for it to reach escape velocity is huge—so huge that any rocky comet would have been melted before it could escape. So Venus’s escape from Jupiter is impossible. Even if it were somehow possible, the escape velocity for Jupiter is sixty kilometers per second and escape velocity for the solar system is sixty-three kilometers per second (Sagan 1981). Thus, there is an extremely narrow velocity range that would allow Venus to escape from Jupiter, yet stay in the solar system.

Further, Velikovsky never specifies any real mechanism for Earth’s rotation stopping and starting as Venus passes by. The stops and starts must have taken place in only a few hours. If that were so, why wasn’t everything on the planet tossed off into space? After all, the speed of Earth’s rotation is just over a thousand miles per hour. If that speed were reduced sharply over a short period of time, almost everything on the planet other than mountains would fly off into space as a result of inertia.

According to Velikovsky, at least a considerable portion of the craters on the Moon were created in historical times while Venus was whizzing about the solar system. Studies have shown, however, that the craters on the moon are millions of years older than Velikovsky claims. And if the cosmic events of which Velikovsky speaks caused craters on the moon, they should also have made craters on Earth. Such recent craters simply do not exist on Earth. Sagan (1981) discusses other points of lunar geology that show Velikovsky’s theories to be wrong.

If Venus were born of Jupiter, the composition of these two planets should be very similar. In reality, the compositions of Venus and Jupiter are extremely different. Jupiter is made up largely of hydrogen and helium gases. Venus is a solid planet, about five times denser than Jupiter, with a nickel and iron composition like that of Earth. Nor is the atmosphere of Venus like that of Jupiter. Venus’s atmosphere is a combination of carbon dioxide with some clouds that contain about 80 percent sulfuric acid.

Velikovsky’s lack of scientific expertise is shown by his interchangeable use of the words hydrocarbons and carbohydrates. Thus, Velikovsky says that the manna that fell from heaven and fed the Israelites came from the tail of the comet Venus. It seems that comets’ tails have been shown to contain hydrocarbon fragments. Hydrocarbons are organic compounds containing only carbon and hydrogen (acetylene is an example). Carbohydrates are organic compounds such as sugars and starches. They are good to eat, but they are not found in comets. Not knowing the difference between the two, Velikovsky assumed they were the same.

Velikovsky and his followers often claim that his theory made several correct predictions about the nature and characteristics of the planets. One such prediction concerns the temperature of Venus and Mars. Velikovsky said in Worlds in Collision (1950) that Venus was hot. Although his precise meaning is unclear, he apparently meant that Venus was giving off more heat to space than it was receiving from the Sun (Sagan 1981). This additional heat was said to have come from Venus’s cometary travels when it passed close to the Sun. Velikovsky also said that Mars gives off more heat than it receives from the Sun, heat received when it encountered Venus in its travels. Neither Venus nor Mars radiates more heat than it receives from the Sun. In this sense, then, both of Velikovsky’s predictions were wrong. When it was discovered in the early 1970s that the surface temperature of Venus was high, about 850 degrees Fahrenheit, Velikovsky and his followers changed the nature of the prediction after the fact and claimed that it was correct. They conveniently forgot the prediction about Mars, which is wrong no matter how one interprets it. As Sagan says, there is a “planetary double standard at work” (p. 245).