I feel like I have to explain who Immanuel Velikovsky was, it’s been so long that he pinged on the radar. He was a crackpot who published a series of pseudo-erudite books in which he used a combination of bullshit Bible scholarship and bad physics to bamboozle audiences –and it worked, because physicists couldn’t address the claims about what the Bible said and the Bible scholars were cowed by the physics. But he had Venus erupting out of Jupiter and ping-ponging around the solar system at the time of the Exodus, and sailing past Earth to rain down manna on the Hebrews (turns out he couldn’t tell the difference between carbohydrates and hydrocarbons, either). It was stupidity squared, but had a brief surge in notoriety when some scientists suggested that his book be banned.
Anyway, I hadn’t heard much about Velikovsky in years, and was thinking that was one kook who’d finally been forgotten, but now I learn that a remnant strain of Velikovskyism lurks in an unsurprising place: among the climate change denialists.
This doesn’t warrant a long article but it ended up being longish. It’s just to comment on the fact that Anthony Watts has published another article from Tim Ball, pushing Velikovsky’s crank ideas as science. Tim argues that scientists shouldn’t point out dumb and wrong notions posing as science. Tim calls such behaviour “scientific elitism”.
Anthony Watts gives an excuse (if you can call it that) for publishing such nonsense, saying that he promotes Velikovsky “in the context of learning” and seems to think the Director of GISS NASA is a coward for not doing the same.
Well, hey, Velikovsky does well among those who don’t understand physics or chemistry, so I guess it’s not unusual that he would thrive among the denialists. He has found his people.
As William Connolley put it over on SB: How embarrassing for Velikovsky.
Dunc, yer link is borked
Indeed it is. Apologies, let’s try that again: How embarrassing for Velikovsky.
(The post itself isn’t very substantial, I just wanted an excuse to quote the headline.)
Oh for feck’s sake — Velikovsky ? That eejit was throughly debunked so many yonks ago multicellular life hadn’t yet evolved.
Oh, so that’s where that came from. I remember reading a science fiction novel by James Hogan that had that happen, and it was just generally a bizarre novel where Earth was once a moon of Saturn, etc, etc.
umm, a slightly rational approach to reading Veli. To read all the nonsense as motivation to learn the reason it is bafflegab. E.G.: Veli is one way to learn the difference between HydroCarbons and CarboHydrates.
But to use that as justification for spouting bafflegab denial of climate change is the wrong way to teach people about hydrocarbons [forced coincidence].
You just gave me a pleasant flashback to Martin Gardner’s book Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus. My copy was destroyed in a basement flood, but I recall that he spent a lengthy chapter demolishing Velikovsky’s views.
I am proud of my degree, but ashamed that my university once gave Velikovsky an honorary doctorate…
Not only among them. I recently read a completely uncritical post about him on a Baptist blog (and one that is relatively liberal for a Southern Baptist, he thinks women can be ministers). http://www.wadeburleson.org/2016/02/why-earth-cracks-up-and-you-dont-have-to.html
One draw dropping quote:
“I recently read Earth in Upheaval and Worlds in Collision by Immanuel Velikovsky, the greatest Russian scientist of all time”
That’s a name I’ve barely run across since the alt.skeptic days back on Usenet….ugh.
On a related note, you’ll be saddened to know that Jiri Mrusek is still out there peddling his numerological wankery surrounding the Nazca Lines as well. Old school cranks never die….
Erich von Daniken and Heribert Illig are due for a revival some time soon too.
My dad was a fan of Velikovsky. He had no background in the Bible, ancient history, cosmology, physics, or any area of science — but he appreciated a fascinating story which not only drew together “everything,” but came from an “outsider” to boot. Velikovsky’s lack of acclaim from experts was a definite plus. It meant he was thinking outside the box. It meant he was fighting the elitists. My guess is that, were he still alive today, Dad would champion anyone who “argues that scientists shouldn’t point out dumb and wrong notions posing as science,” creationist source or not.
But he wouldn’t put it that way, of course. There’d be language about “open minds” and “examining the evidence for yourself.” It’s always the same old bromides. People really want to think that science means that truth has no limits but the ones you put on it.
I seem to recall reading an article or two in skeptic sources which argued that the issue was never over having the book banned per se. The complaint was that the publisher had put the book out under its prestigious science division, instead of letting it go to one of their more lightweight presses. Scientists wanted Worlds in Collision removed from the name/area where THEY published … and republished under the label which did pop psychology, cook books, and ghost stories. Or something like that.
I actually thought we were over this. But as we see with the present story, no popular but wrong idea ever really dies. I wonder what we should call this phenomenon. Maybe the van Daniken effect.
Anyway, I remember starting to read his book back in the …, oh maybe late ’70s’ when I was but a young lad. I recall at first being very intrigued by his claims (naturally trusting what a sciencey sounding adult had to say). But gradually I came to realize it was just b.s., right up there with von Danikens’ crazy but wildly popular Chariots of the Gods, which was also making the rounds at the time. That one even garnered a television ‘documentary’ that was the talk of the school playground the next day.
I too read Velikovsky back in the 70s, I confess, and I think I have at least one of the books hanging around somewhere. I think it was all part of learning that while conventional wisdom is often wrong so are most unconventional theories. (But Wegener! Shakes fist at sky! Someday the world will understand!) I insist that I never read or considered reading Chariot of the Gods, though.
Wow, I hadn’t thought about Velikovsky in ages , decades pehaps. I used to be quite a fan of those theories, they were just so neat. They explained so many things, all in one go – Venus’s surface temperature! The rotation axis of Uranus! The Plagues of Egypt! Mind you, I was 10 at the time, didn’t know the first thing about physics…
I can well imagine they would have.
Far better to to re-categorize this sort of publication (as not-science) than try to ban/supress it. That only gives the authors (and their acolytes) opportunity to play the martyr, or, perhaps, the “super-clever outsider who makes original, ground-breaking discoveries that you plodders just don’t understand because you’re too hide-bound.”
Sheldrake and his bloody morphic resonances spring to mind, particularly.
Back in the day, I read Sagan’s deconstruction of Worlds in Collision, and Sagan did point out, all the time, how attractive the work was, as “The” says, so neat.
Petesh:
That, I read. Mostly on the insistence of the ex, who bought into it all the way.
I thought Velikovsky and climate denialism went way back. Anthropogenic climate change is hard to deny if you understand the greenhouse effect. So some reject this simple thermodynamic consequence entirely, but then you run into problems with the climate of Venus, which is all but impossible to explain otherwise. The few alternatives I’ve seen offered are the idea that it was just formed as per Velikovsky, and whatever the electric universe people are about, which seem to be closely related anyway.
Brett No. 5:
Well actually Velikovsky did in fact claim that the Earth once orbited Saturn has a moon and further that Noah’s flood was caused by the Earth moving through a cloud of water ejected by a explosion from Saturn. Further the Atlantic ocean according to Velikovsky was less than 100,000 years old. The craters on the moon were according to Velikovsky less than 4,000 years old. And that is only the tip of the iceberg of Velikovsky’s crank notions.
Has for Hogan towards the end of his life he became a convert to Velikovsky’s absurdities and he wrote some Sci-Fi novels with Velikovskian elements basically has propaganda for Velikovsky’s views. Also Hogan became a supporter of Holocaust denial and Aids denialism. In other words towards the end of his life Hogan became a believer in an assortment of crank views.
What a flashback! I actually saw the guy in person when I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. It was 1967 or 1968, I think. He came to campus at the invitation of student government to give a talk on his ideas. I was taking a course the History of Science at the time, and the professor, who shall remain nameless, but who was an extremely popular lecturer, literally forbade his graduate students from attending Velikovski’s talk. He also raved on to us undergrads about not going, either. So naturally I went. He struck me as a nice old guy, a bit dotty, but not dangerous. I had read his book before hearing him and thought it was bogus, and nothing he said changed my mind. I don’t recall any rudeness or hostility in the audience–he was received mainly as an entertaining eccentric. The one lasting thing that did happen, however, was that I lost a lot of the respect I had previously had for my history of science prof. He revealed himself as a censorious ideologue, and I did not like it. You can be right without acting like a jerk.
Facts are liberal and elitist.
Potah-to, propane-o.
@pacal #17 – What a shame about James Hogan! I love his “Giants” novels and several other works, especially The Proteus Operation. Oh well, I guess it’s similar to having to separate my love from the Sherlock Homes canon from Doyle’s regrettable belief in spiritualism.
IV’s followers consider him a martyr for his publisher having been boycotted, someone like Galileo or Giordano Bruno. But he was never forced to recant under threat of torture, let alone burned at the stake.
IV’s theories got a vogue again in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when some people started claiming that his theories were 100% vindicated by discoveries about Venus and Mars made with spacecraft. Carl Sagan organized an AAAS session to consider his theories, and IV himself participated. CS wrote “An Analysis of Worlds in Collision”, reprinted in “Broca’s Brain” as “Venus and Dr. Velikovsky”. My favorite part of it was where he was discussing the book with a professor of Semitic literatures who thought that IV’s Biblical, Babylonian, rabbinical, and other such citations were nonsense but who was impressed with IV’s astronomy. CS had the opposite impression.
IV isn’t even original. William Whiston, a contemporary of Sir Isaac Newton, had proposed that Noah’s Flood was caused by a near-collision with a comet (“A New Theory of the Earth from its Original to the Consummation of All Things”, 1696). Late in the 19th cy., Ignatius Donnelly proposed that a comet hit the earth, causing calamities that are remembered in numerous myths and legends (“Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel”, 1883). IV’s work owes much to ID’s work, but with very little credit.
At least they didn’t quote Ted Holden.
Interesting see Velikovsky come up after recently spotting another all but forgotten fringe science book in a local “take one, leave one” bookshelf. It’s In His Image: The Cloning of Man by David Rorvik. In this 1978 book Rorvik, a journalist, claimed that he helped an unnamed wealthy businessman assemble a team that successfully produced a clone of the businessman, carried to term by a surrogate mother. Rorvik has to date refused to give a name of the supposed businessman, or anyone else involved, saying he promised not to, and many people consider the whole thing a hoax.
I remember excitedly telling my mother about the books I had read by Velikovsky and Erich von Daniken when I was just into my teens. She gave me a look that I only understood many years later: you’re wasting your time!
I was first introduced to Velikovsky’s ideas by none other than Isaac Asimov, in one of the few interesting books in my school library. Asimov demolished him pretty thoroughly of course, in favour of what was for many years the orthodoxy – that the planets formed more or less where they are now.
What’s intriguing is that the pendulum has now swung back a little, and ideas about the planets migrating and even swapping places are no longer seen as outlandish. In fact this is now seen as the only way to explain the solar system as we see it today – especially as our solar system now looks odd compared to the many extrasolar systems that have now been discovered. Intriguingly, these disturbances are now thought to account for the Late Heavy Bombardment – the source of many of the craters you can see on the moon today. So while Velikovsky has stayed well and truly wrong, a sort of solar system catastrophism has come back into favour.
Early in the 20th cy. was another crackpot catastrophist cosmology: Hanns Hoerbiger’s Welteislehre (Cosmic Ice Theory). HH was an Austrian mining engineer who one day was looking at the Moon through a small telescope when he was struck by how bright it looked. He became convinced that he was seeing ice, even though it’s mostly dark rock that looks bright by contrast. That was his first “recognition”. His second one was of being suspended in space and watching a silvery pendulum swing and get longer and longer until it broke. He became sure that Newton was wrong and that the force of gravity stops at about 3 times the distance to Neptune.
He proposed that a water-soaked dead star once fell into a supergiant star, vaporizing its water and making the Solar System. As a result, much of the Solar System is made of ice and interplanetary space has lots of ice blocks in it. The Milky Way, he tells us, is a ring of ice blocks, and that “reactionary” astronomers had made fake pictures of it containing lots of stars. There are traces of hydrogen in interplanetary space, and ice blocks fall toward the Sun. Many of them have collided with the Moon and Mars and the outer planets, but on the Earth, they mostly cause big snowstorms and the like. Also from the Earth, you can see ice glinting off of them as meteors. When one of them falls into the Sun, it makes a sunspot and gets vaporized. Its vapors condense into “fine ice”, and Mercury and Venus are covered with it.
The Earth’s current Moon is one of many that our planet has had. The Earth has captured them, and once captured, they spiral into the Earth. The most recent Moon to do so is the Cenozoic or Tertiary Moon, remembered as a big dragon in the sky, and its infall was remembered as Noah’s Flood and end-of-the-world accounts. The creation stories of Genesis are an account of re-creation after this disaster, with the Adam and Eve story being a memory of a Caesarean birth by a heroine of the Flood.
Then the Earth captured its current Moon, Luna, an event that sank Atlantis. It also is spiraling in, and it also will fall into the Earth.
Willy Ley has said about it that finding holes in HH’s theories is about as easy — and as pleasant — as picking Japanese beetles off an infected flowerbed.
HH and schoolteacher Philipp Fauth published their theory as “Glazial-Kosmogonie” during WWI, but it didn’t attract much attention. But afterward, they got a lot of followers and some of them put pressure on people to accept their theories. Like heckling astronomers’ meetings with “Out with astronomical orthodoxy! Give us Hoerbiger!” They associated themselves with Nazism, saying that HH was a successful Austrian “amateur” like Adolf Hitler. But it was not officially accepted, and the Nazis’ propaganda department even stated that “one can be a good National Socialist without believing in the WEL.”
After WWII, the theory’s supporters dropped out of sight, though they reappeared in the 1950’s and 1960’s. They apparently dropped out again, because WEL supporters have no Internet presence that I’ve been able to discover. They can claim vindication from all the ice that has been discovered in the outer Solar System, it must be noted.
Velikovsky also wrote some other books, and he sat on some manuscripts for some other books.
* Earth in Upheaval — he tried to revive early 19th cy. catastrophist geology.
* Ages in Chaos — he tried to argue that the Greek Dark Age (1200 BCE – 700 BCE) did not happen, as a result of moving Bronze Age chronology up by about 500 years.
* Oedipus and Akhnaton — he argued for close parallels between that wayward legendary Greek hero and that Egyptian heretic pharaoh.
As to catastrophism, between around 1850 and around 1950, mainstream geologists were reluctant to accept the existence of any catastrophe larger than any that were observed in recorded history. But that changed as observational and theoretical understanding improved. Recognition of “shock metamorphism” enabled recognition of impact craters. Most of them are heavily eroded and difficult to recognize, with the Arizona one being one of the few well-preserved ones.
The most successful theory of the Moon so far is a very Velikovskian sort of theory — a Mars-sized planet hit the Earth and some of the fragments ended up in orbit. They eventually condensed to from a ring, and then the Moon.
Then there are theories like Uranus and Neptune having changed places, and the “Grand Tack” — Jupiter and Saturn first spiraling inward, then spiraling outward. That explains the asteroid belt and Mars’s small size.