Theos-Talk Archives (August 2005 Message tt00026)

My Challenge
to Conventional Views in Science 

 

“Books written about the solar system before the advent of the space age could as well have been written in Latin or Greek, so dated do they appear to a contemporary reader.”

Zdenek Kopal - The Solar System (Oxford University Press, 1973)



In my published books, notwithstanding often repeated allegations, no physical law is ever abrogated or “temporarily suspended”; what I offered inthem is primarily a reconstruction of events from the historical past. Thus I did not set out to confront the existing views with a theory or hypothesis and to develop it into a competing system. My work is first a reconstruction, not a theory; it is built upon studying the human testimony as preserved in the heritage of all ancient civilizations—all of them in texts bequeathed beginning with the time man learned to write, tell in various forms the very same narrative that the trained eye of a psychoanalyst could notbut recognize as so many variants of the same theme. In hymns, in prayers,in historical texts, in philosophical discourses, in records of astronomical observations, but also in legend and religious myth, the ancients desperately tried to convey to their descendants, ourselves included, the record of events that took place in
circumstances that left a strong imprint on the witnesses. There were physical upheavals on a global scale in historical times; the grandiosity of the events inspired awe. From the Far East to the Far West—the Japanese, Chinese and Hindu civilizations; the Iranian, Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian,Hitto-Chaldean, Israelite and Egyptian records; the Etruscan, Attic and Roman theogonies and philosophies; Scandinavian and Icelandic epics; Mayan, Toltec and Olmec art and legends—all, with no exception, were dominated bythe knowledge of events and circumstances that only the most brazen attitude of science could so completely disregard. 

The scientific community starts its annals with Newton, paying some homage to Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, unaware that the great ones of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries searched through classical authors of antiquity for their great discoveries. Did not Copernicus strike out the name of Aristarchus of Samos from the introduction to De Revolutionibus before he signed imprimatur on his work? Did not Tycho Brahe find the compromising theory of the Sun revolving around the Earth—but Mercury and Venus circling around the Sun—in Heracleides of Pontus, yet announce it as his own? Did not Galileo read of the equal velocity of heavy and light falling bodies inLucretius;1 did not Newton read in Plutarch of the Moon removed from the Earth by fifty-six terrestrial radii and impelled by gravitation to circle around the Earth,2 the basic postulate of Newton’s Principia, and did not Halley read in Pliny about comets returning on their orbits?3 Then why doesmodern science disregard the
persistent reports of events witnessed and recorded in many languages in the writings of the ancients and also transmitted from generation to generation by communities unable to write, by American Indians, by the people of Lapland, the Voguls of Siberia, the aborigines of tropical Africa, the Tahitians in the South Pacific?

Why is theomachy the central theme of all cosmogonical myths? Should not a thinking man pause and wonder why the ancients in both hemispheres worshipped planetary gods; why temples were erected to them, and some are still standing; why sacrifices, even human sacrifices, were brought to them? Why wasSaturn or Cronos or Brahma the supreme deity to be replaced by Jupiter of the Romans, Zeus of the Greeks, Ormuzd of the Iranians, Marduk of the Babylonians, Shiva of the Hindus, Ammon of the Egyptians? Why did the planet Venus—Ishtar, Athene, Kukulcan of the Mayas or Quetzalcohuatl of the Toltecs—become the feared deity, as I saw it omnipresent in Yucatan, where I savored a few days this February, writing this paper? Why is this Morning Starshown in sculpture as a feathered serpent on the grandiose monuments of Uxmal and Chichen Itza, where temples were built, one upon the other, if not to commemorate the ages, the last of which was dominated by Huitzilopochtli, Ares of the Greeks, who
protected the people of Troy, while Athene clashed with him protecting theAchaean host?

Why was Mars of the Romans chosen as the protector of Rome, the greatest empire after the Empire of Heaven (Livy), while Athene gave her name to the capital of Attica, as Tanis to Tunisia? Why were human sacrifices brought inthis country by the Pawnee Indians only a few scores of years ago, every fifty-two years connected with the Venus calendar? Why did the Ancient Assyrians mark on tens of thousands of clay tablets, free from any mythological theme, astronomical observations, but all data from before -687 are in contradiction to known values such as the duration of the daily rotation of theEarth, the time of the vernal equinox—that by the way was repeatedly transferred, as was also the beginning of the year—the ratio of the longest and shortest days of the year, the length of the month and of the year and the motion of the planets? The legends and myths clearly point to an astralorigin of all ancient religions.

The problem that occupied the minds of the Classicists, Meso-american scholars. Orientalists, and students of social anthropology and mythology, was not solved in any one of these disciplines separately. Like the early memoryof a single man, so the early memory of the human race belongs into the domain of the student of psychology. Only a philosophically and historically,but also analytically trained mind can see in the mythological subjects their true content—a mind that learned in long years of exercise to understand the dreams and phantasies of his fellow man.

Thus I entered a field that should be at the basis of the natural sciences,not only of the human soul and of racial memories, and soon I observed that the divisions in science are but artificial. I had to cross barriers. Howcould I do otherwise? Upon the realization that we are unaware of the mostfateful events in human history, I had before me the task of explaining this well-known phenomenon of repression, the realization of which could alsobecome crucial to the survival of the victim of amnesia playing with thermonuclear weapons. But before that I had the task of confronting the humanistic heritage with the message of stones and bones—do geology and paleontology carry the same testimony? I went again from shelf to shelf, once more around the Earth, and the record from the bottom of the sea and from the top of the mountains, from the deserts, jungles, tundras, lakes, rivers and waterfalls, told the same story—documented in every latitude and in every longitude. This evidence is
presented in Earth in Upheaval, which I kept free from any bit of testimony that can be classified as human heritage. The scenes of devastation, massextinction of many species in circumstances that are by far in excess of what can be considered as local catastrophe, the simultaneous change of climate all over the globe thirty-four and twenty-seven centuries ago, the dropof the level of the ocean and many other phenomena observed, could not be accounted for but by paroxysms in which the entire Earth was involved.

A psychological situation provoked the change in the attitude of the scholarly world with the beginning of the Victorian age. The founders of the sciences of geology—Buckland, Sedgwick, and Murchinson (who gave the classification of formations used today); of vertebrate paleontology—Cuvier; and of ichthyology—Louis Agassiz—never doubted that what they observed was the result of repeated cataclysms in which the entire globe partook. Actually, Charles Darwin, observing the destruction of fauna in South America, was convinced that nothing less than the shaking of the entire frame of the Earth could account for what he saw. But the introduction of the principle of uniformitarianism by Charles Lyell, a lawyer who never had field experience, and the acceptance of it on faith by Charles Darwin, are a psychological phenomenon that I observed again and again. Exactly those who, like Darwin, witnessed the omnipresent shambles of an overwhelming fury of devastation on a continental scale,
became the staunchest defenders of the principle of uniformitarianism, that became not just a law, but a principle that grew to a statute of faith inthe natural sciences, as if the reasoning that what we do not observe in our time could not have happened in the past can in any measure claim to be philosophically or scientifically true.

Obviously, a motive is at play that makes appear as scientific principle what is but wishful thinking. For over a century after Copernicus man did notwish to believe that he lives on an Earth that travels, and Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare were not persuaded by that firebrand, Giordano Bruno, of the truth of the Copemican doctrine. Even much less man wishes to face the fact that he travels on a rock in space on a path that proved to be accident-prone. The victory of Darwin’s evolution by natural selection over a six-day creation less than six thousand years ago made it appear that evolution, the only instrument of which is competition, is the ultimate truth. But by competition for survival or for means of existence, never could such different forms as man and an insect with many legs evolve from the same unicellular form, not even in the six billion years that replaced the biblical six thousand. Mutations were necessary, and today we know that by cosmic and x-rays, by
thermal and chemical means—conditions brought about in the catastrophes of the past—massive mutations can be achieved.

The pre-1950 astronomy followed the same pseudo-scientific statute of faith, elevated to a fundamental principle, and made believe that the Earth and other planets travel the same paths for the same six billion years, always repeating the same serene circling. Against this violation of the principleof empiricism in science stood my work. In it I rejected the postulate that the ancients, the Greek philosophers Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Democritus and Plato included (O. Neugebauer in The Exact Sciences in Antiquity wonderswhy Plato is considered anywhere a philosopher of any rank4) were childishin their claims of repeated world conflagrations, and that the ancients were almost imbeciles in their beliefs. The ancients, the canard goes, believed in the Earth placed on the back of a tortoise. Thus it is preferred to start science three hundred years ago, and my work was pronounced (by those who did not read it) as an act of destruction of the entire edifice of science erected by the
giants of science since Copernicus.

I offered a series of claims that naturally followed from the reconstruction. In science they are usually called predictions, but I prefer to term them advance claims. Thus I claimed that Venus, due to its recent birth and dramatic though short history, must be very hot under the clouds, nearly incandescent, and gives off heat—it has not reached thermal balance; that it must have every massive atmosphere; that the atmosphere consisted largely of hydrocarbons but that if oxygen is present petroleum fires must be burning—thus explaining also the present massive carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere; that sulfur and iron (ferruginous pigment) must be present too;and that if the same catalytic process that took place on the Earth when it was enveloped by clouds of Venus’ origin takes place in Venus’ own clouds, they must consist mainly of organic material infused with sulfur and iron molecules. Further, I considered that Venus was disturbed in its rotation.

Venus was found over 750°K. hot—many metals are incandescent at this temperature—while the consensus of opinion among astronomers was 17°C., 3° above the mean annual temperature on Earth. Venus was found rotating slowly and retrogradely. The atmosphere was found very massive, 95 terrestrial pressures near the ground surface, and not reckoning with this possibility, the first Venera probes were crushed. The content of the clouds is stillunsolved, but in a paper in the Winter, 1973-74 issue of Pensée, a journal dedicated to the reconsideration of my views, I elucidated that the spectral features in the ultraviolet, near infrared, infrared and deep infraredcan be accounted for by organic matter, and so can the volatility and the index of refraction. Nitrogen gas, expected by all specialists to comprise as much as 90% of the atmosphere, was not found. The enigma of the very rich content of carbon dioxide below the clouds is solved if the combustion ofhydrocarbons took and still takes
place. I expect that the Venus Mariner X probe of this month will bring usnearer to properly evaluating the content of Venus’ clouds. But the preliminary report already says that “the manner in which that planet was born and matured differed basically from that of Earth.” An editorial in theNew York Times, commenting on the bands and streaks first discovered by Mariner X, spoke of an “uncanny similarity” to the bands “in the atmosphere of Jupiter.” It added that “it is a problem that poses a formidable challenge to astronomers.”

There are problems requiring study that were not discussed in Worlds in Collision because the origin of Venus belongs to the volumes dealing with the earlier catastrophes. How did Venus, in Latin, “the Newcomer,” escape from Jupiter four hundred times more massive?—and Lyttleton’s work givessome idea; or how could Venus be so much heavier per unit of volume than Jupiter?—either it was expelled from inner parts of the giant planet, or gases like hydrogen entered into chemical compounds of higher molecular weight. In Worlds in Collision I suggested that electrical discharges in the atmosphere of ammonia and methane in which Jupiter is rich, would produce hydrocarbons of heavy molecular weight—an experiment successfully performed ten years later by A. T. Wilson. Further, I envisaged fusion of elements—like oxygen to sulphur—in interplanetary discharges.

Orbiter and Surveyor probes of the Moon were followed by Apollo probes; andon the historic night of July 21, 1969, when Man stepped on the Moon, I made a series of claims in an article written at the invitation of the New York Times, and spelled out earlier as well in memos to the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences. Strong magnetic remanence, I claimed, would be discovered in lunar rocks and lavas, though the Moon itself hardly possesses any magnetic field whatsoever. A steep thermal gradient wouldbe found already a few feet under the surface. Thermoluminescence would disclose that the Moon was heated considerably only thousands of years ago. Hydrocarbons, preferably of aromatic structure, would be found in small quantities, but carbides, into which hydrocarbons would transform when heated, in substantial quantities; expressed radioactivity would be detected in lunar soil and rocks; and several more claims. Already following Apollo XI andXII the score was
complete. But each of the discoveries—steep thermal gradient, strong remanent magnetism, recent heating of the lunar surface, carbides and traces of aromatic hydrocarbons, and rich radioactivity of the rocks and dust—evoked exclamations of surprise and at best some far fetched, ad hoc hypotheses. Magnetic anomalies, especially where interplanetary bolts fell, and hugeenclaves of neon and argon 40 in lunar rocks, were also claimed by me in advance of the findings.

The Mars probes disclosed, as I had claimed in Worlds in Collision, a dead planet that went through enormous cataclysmic events, not unlike the Moon. The “canali” proved to be not the product of intelligent work, but rifts caused by twisting of strata. Like on the Moon, enormous craters resultedfrom bubbling, but some formations, especially surrounded with “rays,”resulted, in my view, from interplanetary discharges.

When last December [1973] I was invited to address the scientists of the Langley Space Research Center that prepares the June 1976 Viking probes to Mars, I was told of the program and shown the module. I found that my 1945 copyrighted view, printed also in Worlds in Collision, of the possible abundant presence of argon and neon in the atmosphere of Mars, then a very far-fetched idea, is now incorporated in the program of the 1976 Viking probes. Today, in one of the alternative atmosphere models (the other has nitrogen richly presented - the same alternative I discussed in Worlds in Collision),NASA anticipates as much as 33.3% argon in the atmosphere, but, in my opinion, too little—666 parts per million—neon. Actually, in 1969 I saw my assumption indirectly confirmed when after I expressed my expectation of rich inclusions of argon and neon in lunar rocks, such enigmatic inclusions were found. I based my expectation on the realization that in the eighth century before the present era
Mars and the Moon repeatedly came into near-contacts.

I would speculate that the red color of Mars, due mainly to the ferruginousmaterial acquired from Venus when the latter displaced it from its orbit (in the theomachy described in great detail in the Iliad), may partly be duealso to an electrical effect in a neon-rich Martian atmosphere. I recommended in my lecture and consultation at Langley Space

Research Center several tests not found in their program as it stands now:

1. To study the electrical nature of the sandstorms, occasionally reaching the velocity of one hundred to two hundred miles per hour, in the rarefied atmosphere of the planet. 

2. To search for strong remanent magnetism of rocks and lavas, not just to photograph soil particles attractable to a magnet. As just explained, iron particles will be found in abundance. In future probes anomalous remanent magnetism will be discovered near places where electrical bolts emergedor fell. 

3. To search for expressed radioactivity of the rocks and regolith, especially near large circular formations that resulted from interplanetary discharges. 

4. To investigate the thermal gradient, presumably rather steep, even if only at the depth of two or three feet. 

5. To perform a thermoluminescence experiment on glass-like particles in the Martian soil which will disclose a very recent heating of the Martian surface; if it were not for the expected radioactivity on Mars, the proper result would be twenty-seven centuries for the last heating. 

The logic that led me to these conclusions and suggestions was the same that made me make similar advance claims concerning the Moon before the lunar landings.

I understand that the program will be dominated by an effort to find out whether there is or there was life on Mars; organic materials will be searched for and I count with the possibility that traces of hydrocarbons may be found in the Martian soil, but almost all hydrocarbons must have turned intocarbide rocks by heating; cultures of possible micro-organisms will be investigated for changes in color and for the production of gases.

In Worlds in Collision I compiled descriptions from many sources of a widely spread pestilence that accompanied Mars’ close approaches; it is not excluded that Mars is richly populated by micro-organisms pathogenic to man. I suggested an inclusion of a microscope in the equipment of Viking and, ifpossible, of an electron microscope for the study of viruses. I do not discount the probability that the seasonal changes in the color of the Martiansurface may be due to seasonal microbial or other low vegetative activity.

It is preferable to postpone the second Viking probe, now planned as identical with the first and following it by one month, in order to rework the program and to include the instruments needed for the test I enumerated.

When earlier, a year and a half ago, in August [1972] , I was invited to lecture and consult at Ames Space Research Center (Division of Exobiology), Isuggested also that microbial life able to catalyze can possibly be found in Venus’ clouds, lower forms of insect life on Jupiter, and primitive plant life on Saturn, besides what I said now of Mars. So much for cosmology and also the evolution of life.

If I was completely at odds with the cosmogony that had the solar system without history since creation, I was also carrying my heresy into a most sacred field, the holy of holies of science—celestial mechanics. I had a chapter on the subject at the end of Worlds in Collision, but I kept those galleys from inclusion in the book and instead I included only one or two paragraphs—and the only italicized words in the book are found in them—namely: ‘The accepted celestial mechanics, notwithstanding the many calculations that have been carried out to many decimal places, or verified by celestial motions, stands only ;/ the sun, the source of light, warmth, and other radiation produced by fusion and fission of atoms, is as a whole an electrically neutral body, and also if the planets, in their usual orbits, are neutral bodies.” I showed how the events I reconstructed could have occurred in the frame of the classical celestial mechanics, but coming from the field of studying the working of
the brain—I was the first to claim that electrical disturbances lie at the basis of epileptic seizures—I was greatly surprised to find that astronomy, the queen of sciences, lives still in the pre-Faraday age, not even in the time of kerosene lamps, but of candles and oil. It was, of course, known since Gilbert that the Earth is a magnet, and G. E. Hale discovered that solar spots are magnetic and that the Sun possesses a general magnetic field. But this did not keep Einstein, a few years later, from accounting forthe Mercurial precession by a new principle instead of first eliminating the effect of the newly discovered solar magnetic field on Mercury’s movement.

I claimed the existence of a magnetosphere above the terrestrial ionosphere- it was discovered by Van Allen in 1958; I claimed that this magnetosphere reaches as far as the lunar orbit—it was discovered by Ness in 1964; I claimed that the interplanetary space is magnetic and the field centers on the Sun and rotates with it—it was discovered in 1960 by simultaneous observation of Pioneer V and Explorer X, one travelling around the Sun and theother around the Earth; I claimed that Jupiter sends out radio noises,5 and actually offered in writing in June 1954 to Albert Einstein to stake our protracted debate as to whether, besides inertia and gravitation, electromagnetic interactions participate in celestial mechanics: Does or does not Jupiter send out radio noises?—and Einstein wrote his note of disbelief on the margin of my letter. But on the 8th of April, 1955, nine days before his death, I brought to him the news that Jupiter noises were discovered by chance; those who detected
them for long weeks disbelieved their find and the Jovian origin of the noises.

Lately I lecture frequently for physical and engineering societies and faculties, and I challenge those in the audience who believe that a magnetic body can move through a magnetic field without being affected by it to lift their hands. Can Jupiter with its immense magnetosphere move in the magneticfield centered on the Sun, if only of a few gammas, without being affectedby it? Can the satellites of Jupiter plow through the magnetosphere of thegiant planet without being affected by it? On no occasion I saw a hand raised.

Only a few weeks ago, preliminary reports in Science on the Pioneer X December flyby recorded a series of unusual electromagnetic phenomena involving Jupiter and its satellites. At about the same time we read of radio noises for the first time detected from a comet, as Kohoutek was approaching its perhelion. (Incidentally, contrary to the unanimous opinion expressed by astronomical authorities, with which I disagreed, Kohoutek did not develop into the greatest celestial spectacle of the century.) The role of electromagnetic interaction between a comet and the Sun was another subject of my detailed discussion, oral and written, with Einstein.

With the discovery of quasars, magnetic binaries, black holes and collidinggalaxies sending out agonized radio signals, the electromagnetic nature ofthe universe is no more in question. Space is not empty either. I feel like calling René Descartes from the Land of Shades to present his appeal, because as late as 1949, a year before the publication of Worlds in Collision, the verdict was, according to the philosopher Butterfield, that “The clean and comparatively empty Newtonian skies ultimately carried the day against a Cartesian universe packed with matter and agitated with whirlpools, for the existence of which scientific observation provided no evidence.”

But ten years later we read: “Gone forever is any earthbound notion of space as a serene thoroughfare . . . . a fantastic amount of cosmic traffic (hot gaseous clouds, deadly rays, bands of electricity) rushes by at high speed, circles, crisscrosses, and collides.”

How could I produce this score of correct prognostications? Professor V. Eshleman of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, obviously astounded, wrote on September II, 1970, to a news-writer— “I am completely mystified as to how Velikovsky reaches his conclusions. It is almost as though he does it through will power alone. . . .” But could I, by will power alone, initiate Jupiter’s noises?

There is no mystery. My advance claims are a “natural fallout from a single central idea,” in the words of one student of the affair. Reading of my work is a prerequisite for understanding the way I reach my conclusions.

Yet not a few upheld the scientific method by absolving themselves from reading the book they discuss and occasionally suppress. These days one planetarium astronomer authoritatively pronounced my score of correct predictionsas compatible with the law of averages and added that I would have been unfortunate if my score were any less. Seven years earlier the same planetarium astronomer was the mastermind in the refusal of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia to permit the oldest astronomical association of America, the Ritten-house Society, to convene at their traditional meeting place in the Institute when they invited me to address their members—a story that had many reverberations.

The behavior of the scientific community was and partly still is a psychological phenomenon. The spectacle of the scientific establishment going through all the paces of self degradation has nothing with which to compare in the past, though every time a new leaf in science was turned over there was a minor storm, and it is not without precedent that most authoritative voices in science usually served to discourage the trail blazers—think of Lord Kelvin, unsurpassed authority of later Victorian days, who rejected ClerkMaxwell’s electromagnetic theory, demeaned Guglieimo Marconi’s radiotelegraphy, and till his death in 1907 proclaimed Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen fora charlatan.

But it is without precedent that the entire scientific community should be aroused to very base actions of compelling, by organized boycott, the publisher of a book checked and rechecked before the printing to discontinue itspublication, to destroy the entire stock, and to punish the editor of twenty-five years service by dismissal. This community offered a united front of academic and scientific societies, of faculties, of scientific and semi-scientific press against a solitary figure whose only iniquity was to present views carefully arrived at in more than a decade of work, supplied with all references to enable the reader to check multitudinous sources, with never a jest or a harsh word against those with whom the non-conformist disagreed, with no new terms introduced, in lucid language, though foreign to me,never given to misunderstanding.

Now, after twenty-four years, and more than seventy-two printings in the English language alone, forty of which were in hard cover, my Worlds in Collision, as well as Earth in Upheaval, do not require any revisions, whereas all books on terrestrial and celestial sciences of 1950 need complete rewriting. The opposition and the indecent forms it took are a psychological phenomenon and cannot be explained by a mere desire to protect the vested interests. The forms the suppression assumed are so multiple and sometimes ingenious, but mostly crassly rough and often dishonest, that only having been trained in recognizing various forms of resistance with which analytical patients react when unwelcome truth is about to reveal itself, could I understand the unique spectacle which I observe now for a full generation.

If a sociologist endeavors to divide the guilt between the establishment and the non-conformist, and claims neutrality, then he did not learn to discern objectivity from neutrality. And if a professor of astronomy puts passages in my book which are not there and then makes the class of tuition-paying students roar by attacking those passages, this roar may still sound in his ears when there will be no merriment in it. In these antics, an experienced psychoanalyst recognizes a state of anxiety. “We are shaking in our shoes—but with laughter” wrote an early critic, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkinof Harvard. Actually the astronomers of that university must have felt threatened by the book and even an entire generation later, acting as if in peril, a Nobel prize winner wrote to a high school girl to close Worlds in Collision and not to open it again in her lifetime, only to admit three yearslater to the editor of Pensée that he never himself read the book. Thosewho act almost suicidally
should keep their fingers on the pulse of time.

In the behavior of the scientific establishment the desperate resistance that bedevils human society found its expression. As members of the human race, we are afraid to face our past. But as Santayana wrote, those who do notremember the past are condemned to repeat it and—this time, I am afraid,in a man-made thermonuclear holocaust.

My work today is no longer heretical. Most of it is incorporated in textbooks and it does not matter whether credit is properly assigned. My work is not concluded—I only opened new vistas. The young and the imaginative flock in an ever increasing stream. Numerous colleges and universities in this country hold courses or seminars on my work, include my books among the required readings and have theses on my ideas written for graduate degrees. Those who stopped thinking since graduating will claim authority, soon to find that they are left without a following. I may have even caused retardation in the development of science by making some opponents cling to their unacceptable views only because such views may contradict Velikovsky - like sticking to the completely unsupportable hypothesis of greenhouse effect as the cause of Venus’ heat, even in violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

This spring, besides this Symposium on my work, two more international symposia dedicated to the subject will take place without my having any part ininitiating them. Those who prefer name calling to argument, wit to deliberation, or those who point a triumphant finger at some detail that they misinterpret, yet claim that my entire work ought to collapse, and boast of their own exclusiveness as a caste of specialists—as if I claimed omniscience and infallibility and as if I wrote a sacred book that falls due to some possible error—are not first in their art. I shall quote Giordano Bruno, and one of the organizers of this symposium, Professor Owen Gingerich, Harvard’s historian of science, is well familiar with Bruno’s description of how his contemporaries used to conduct a dispute:

“With a sneer, a smile, a certain discrete malice, that which they have not succeeded in proving by argument—nor indeed can it be understood by themselves—nevertheless by these tricks of courteous disdain they pretend to have proven, endeavouring not only to conceal their own patently obvious ignorance but to cast it on to the back of their adversary. For they dispute not in order to find or even to seek Truth, but for victory, and to appear the more learned and strenuous upholders of a contrary opinion. Such persons should be avoided by all who have not a good breastplate of patience.”

After all, it really does not matter so much what Velikovsky’s role is inthe scientific revolution that goes now across all fields from astronomy with emphasis on charges, plasmas and fields, to zoology with its study of violence in man. But this symposium in the frame of the AAAS is, I hope, a retarded recognition that by name-calling instead of testing, by jest instead of reading and meditating, nothing is achieved. None of my critics can erase the magnetosphere, nobody can stop the noises of Jupiter, nobody can cool off Venus, and nobody can change a single sentence in my books.


References

1. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, translated by C. Bailey (Oxford, 1924; earlier ed., 1910) Bk. II, lines 23ff.: “For all things that fallthrough the water and thin air, these things must need quicken their fall in proportion to their weights, just because the body of water and the thinnature of air cannot check each thing equally, but give place more quicklywhen overcome by heavier bodies. But, on the other hand, the empty void cannot on any side, at any time, support anything, but rather, as its own nature desires, it continues to give place; wherefore all things must needs beborne on through the calm void, moving at equal rate with unequal weights.” 

2. Plutarch, Of the face appearing in the orb of the Moon, translated by W. Goodwin, (Boston, 1898) 246f. “They who place the moon lowest say that her distance from us contains six and fifty of the earth’s semi-diameters, that is, that she is six and fifty times as far from us as we are from the centre of the earth; which is forty thousand stadia, according to those that make their computation moderately. Therefore the sun is above fortymillions and three hundred thousand stadia distant from the moon; so far is she from the sun by reason of gravity, and so near does she approach to the earth. So that if substances are to be distinguished by places, the portion and region of the earth challenges to itself the moon, which by reason of neighborhood and proximity, has the right to be reputed and reckoned amongs the terrestrial natures of bodies.” Cf. Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, translated by A. Motte, 1729, revised by F.Cajori, Berkeley, 1946. Book
III: The System of the World. Proposition IV, Theorem IV, p. 407: The meandistance of the moon from the earth in syzygies in semi-diameters of the earth is, acc. to Ptolemy and most astronomers, 59; acc. to Vendelin and Huggins, 60... and to Tycho, 56½...” 

3. Pliny, Natural History, II. 23. “Some person may suppose that these stars [comets] are permanent and that they move through their proper orbits, but that they are only visible when they recede from the sun...” 

4. O. Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 1952), p. 146. 

5. I. Velikovsky, “On the Advance Claim of Jupiter’s Radionoises,” Kronos III.:1 (Aug., 1977), pp. 27-30. 

 


		
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