Theos-Talk Archives (August 2005 Message tt00030)

8/9/2005 4:20 AM


Thanks Cass:

Dallas

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-----Original Message-----
From: Cass Silva
Sent: Sunday, August 07, 2005 
To: 
Subject: Velikovksy's Science

ON PREDICTION IN SCIENCE 


================== PART 2 ==========================


=================PART 2 ============================

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 for the 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
the other 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 magnetic field
centered on the Sun, if only of a few gammas, without being affected by it? 


Can the satellites of Jupiter plow through the magnetosphere of the giant
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 colliding
galaxies sending out agonized radio signals, the electromagnetic nature of
the 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.


SUPPRESSION BY SCIENTISTS


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
predictions as 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 Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory, demeaned Guglieimo
Marconi’s radiotelegraphy, and till his death in 1907 proclaimed Wilhelm
Konrad Roentgen for a 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 [Macmillan] of a book checked and rechecked before the printing to
discontinue its publication, 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-Gaposchkin of 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 years later to the
editor of PENSÉE that he never himself read the book. Those who 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
not remember 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
in initiating 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 in
the 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 fall
through 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 thin
nature of air cannot check each thing equally, but give place more quickly
when 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
be borne 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 forty millions
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 among the
terrestrial natures of bodies.” Cf. Isaac Newton, MATHEMATICAL PRINCIPLESOF
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 mean distance 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 Radio-noises,”
Kronos III. :1 (Aug., 1977), pp. 27-30. 

-----------------------------------------------------------

In order to bring into proper focus the significance of correct prediction
in science, I offer at the start a short survey of the most celebrated
cases, and it is not by chance that almost all of them come from the domain
of astronomy. These cases are spectacular and, with one or two exceptions,
are well known.

The story of scientific “clairvoyance” in modern astronomy starts with
Johannes Kepler, a strange case and little known. When Galileo, using the
telescope he had built after the model of an instrument invented by a Danish
craftsman, discovered the satellites circling Jupiter, Kepler became very
eager to see the satellites himself and begged in letters to have an
instrument sent to Prague; Galileo did not even answer him. Next, Galileo
made two more discoveries, but before publishing them in a book, he assured
himself of priority by composing cryptograms, not an uncommon procedure in
those days: statements written in Latin were deliberately reduced to the
letters of which the sentences were composed, or, if the author of the
cryptogram so wished, the letters were re-assembled to make a different
sentence. The second way was chosen by Galileo when he thought he had
discovered that Saturn is “a triple” planet, having observed appendiceson
both sides of Saturn, but not having discerned
that they were but a ring around the planet, a discovery reserved for
Christian Huygens in 1659, half a century later. Kepler tried to read the
cryptogram of letters recombined into a non-revealing sentence, but did not
succeed. He offered as his solution: “Salute, fiery twin, offspring of Mars”
(“Salve, umbistineum geminatum Martia proles” ). Of this, Arthur Koestler in
The Sleepwalkers (1959) wrote (p. 377): “He [Kepler] accordingly believed
that Galileo had discovered two moons around Mars.” But Galileo did not
discover them and they remained undiscovered for more than two hundred fifty
years. Strangely, Koestler passes over the incident without expressing
wonder at Kepler’s seeming prescience.

As I have shown in Worlds in Collision (“The Steeds of Mars” ) the poets
Homer and Virgil knew of the trabants of Mars, visualized as his steeds,
named Deimos (Terror) and Phobos (Rout). Kepler referred to the satellites
of Mars as being “burning” or “flaming” , the same way the ancientshad
referred to the steeds of Mars.

Ancient lore preserved traditions from the time when Mars, Ares of the
Greeks, was followed and preceded by swiftly circling satellites with their
blazing manes. “When Mars was very close to the earth, its two trabants were
visible. They rushed in front of and around Mars; in the disturbances that
took place, they probably snatched some of Mars’ atmosphere, dispersed asit
was, and appeared with gleaming manes” (Worlds in Collision, p. 230).

Next, Galileo made the discovery that Venus shows phases, as the Moon does.
This time he secured his secret by locking it in a cryptogram of a mere
collection of letters—so many A’s, so many B’s, and so on. Kepler again
tried to read the cryptogram and came up with the sentence: “Macula rufa in
Jove est gyratur mathem etc.” which in translation reads: “There is a red
spot in Jupiter which rotates mathematically.”

The wondrous thing is: how could Kepler have known of the red spot in
Jupiter, then not yet discovered? It was discovered by J. D. Cassini in the
1660’s, after the time of Kepler and Galileo. Kepler’s assumption that
Galileo had discovered a red spot in Jupiter amazes and defies every
statistical chance of being a mere guess. But the possibility is not
excluded that Kepler found the information in some Arab author or some other
source, possibly of Babylonian or Chinese origin. Kepler did not disclose
what the basis of his reference to the red spot of Jupiter was — he could
not have arrived at it either by logic and deduction or by sheer guesswork.
A scientific prediction must follow from a theory as a logical consequence.
Kepler had no theory on that. It is asserted that the Chinese observed solar
spots many centuries before Galileo did with his telescope. Observing solar
spots, the ancients could have conceivably observed the Jovian red spot,
too. Jesuit scholars traveled in the
early 17th century to China to study Chinese achievements in astronomy.

Kepler was well versed in ancient writings, also knowledgeable in medieval
Arab authors; for instance, he quoted Arzachel to support the view that in
ancient times Babylon must have been situated two and a half degrees more to
the north, and this on the basis of the data on the duration of the longest
and shortest days in the year as registered in ancient Babylon.1 

Jonathan Swift, in his Gulliver’s Travels (1726) tells of the astronomersof
the imaginary land of the Laputans who asserted they had discovered that the
planet Mars has “two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars,
whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary planet
exactly three of [its] diameters, and the outermost Five; the former
revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one-and-a-half;
so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same
proportion with the cubes of their distance from the center of Mars, which
evidently shows them to be governed by the same law of gravitation that
influences the other heavenly bodies.”

About this passage a literature of no mean number of authors grew in the
years after 1877, when Asaph Hall, a New England carpenter turned
astronomer, discovered the two trabants of Mars. They are between five and
ten miles in diameter. They revolve on orbits close to their primary and in
very short times: actually the inner one, Phobos, makes more than three
revolutions in the time it takes Mars to complete one rotation on its axis;
and were there intelligent beings on Mars they would need to count two
different months according to the number of satellites (this is no special
case — Jupiter has twelve moons and Saturn ten*), and also observe one moon
ending its month three times in one Martian day. It is a singular case in
the solar system among the natural satellites that a moon completes one
revolution before its primary finishes one rotation.

Swift ascribed to the Laputans some amazing knowledge—actually he himself
displayed, it is claimed, an unusual gift of foreknowledge. The chorus of
wonderment can be heard in the evaluation of C. P. Olivier in his article
“Mars” written for the Encyclopedia Americana (1943):

“When it is noted how very close Swift came to the truth, not only in merely
predicting two small moons but also the salient features of their orbits,
there seems little doubt that this is the most astounding ’prophecy’ ofthe
past thousand years as to whose full authenticity there is not a shadow of
doubt.”

The passage in Kepler is little known—Olivier, like other writers on the
subject of Swift’s divination, was unaware of it, and the case of Swift’s
prophecy appears astounding: the number of satellites, their close distances
to the body of the planet, and their swift revolutions are stated in a book
printed one hundred and fifty years to the year before the discovery of
Asaph Hall.

Let us examine the case. Swift, being an ecclesiastical dignitary and a
scholar, not just a satirist, could have learned of Kepler’s passage about
two satellites of Mars; he could also have learned of them in Homer and
Virgil where they are described in poetic language (actually, Asaph Hall
named the discovered satellites by the very names the flaming trabants of
Mars were known by from Homer and Virgil); and it is also not inconceivable
that Swift learned of them in some old manuscript dating from the Middle
Ages and relating some ancient knowledge from Arabian, or Persian, or Hindu,
or Chinese sources. To this day an enormous number of medieval manuscripts
have not seen publication and in the days of Newton (Swift published
Gulliver’s Travels in the year Newton was to die), as we know from Newton’s
own studies in ancient lore, for every published tome there was a
multiplicity of unpublished classical, medieval, and Renaissance texts.

That Swift knew Kepler’s laws, he himself gave testimony, and this in the
very passage that concerns us: “. . . so that the squares of their
periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of
their distance from the center of Mars” is the Third Law of Kepler.

But even if we assume that Swift knew nothing apart from the laws of Kepler
to make his guess, how rare would be such a guess of the existence of two
Martian satellites and of their short orbits and periods? As to their
number, in 1726 there were known to exist: five satellites of Saturn, four
of Jupiter, one of Earth, and none of Venus. Guessing, one could reasonably
say: none, one, two, three, four, or five. The chance of hitting on the
right Figure was one in six, or the chance of any one side of a die’s coming
up in a throw. The smallness of the guessed satellites would necessarily
follow from their not having been discovered in the age of Newton. Their
proximity to the parent planet and their short periods of revolution were
but one guess, not two, by anybody who knew of the work of Newton and
Kepler. The nearness of the satellites to the primary could have been
assumed on the basis of what was known about the satellites of Jupiter and
Saturn, lo, one of the Galilean (or
Medicean) satellites of Jupiter, revolves around the giant planet in I day
18.5 hours (the satellite closest to Jupiter was discovered in 1892 by
Barnard and is known as the “fifth satellite” in order of discovery; it
revolves around Jupiter, a planet ten thousand times the size of Mars, in 1
1.9 hours). The three satellites of Saturn discovered by Cassini before the
days of Swift - Tethys, Dione and Rhea - revolve respectively in I day 21.3
hours, 2 days 17 hours, and 4 days 12.4 hours. (Mimas and Enceladus,
discovered by Herschelin 1789, revolve in 22. 6 hours and I day 8.9 hours.)
The far removed satellites of Jupiter were not yet discovered in the days of
Newton and Swift.

It remains to compare the figures of Swift with those of Hall: there was no
true agreement between what the former wrote in his novel and what the
latter found through his telescope. For Deimos, Swift’s figure, expressedin
miles from the surface of Mars, is 18,900 miles; actually it is 12,500
miles; Swift gave its revolution time as 21.5 hours—actually it is 30.3
hours. For Phobos, Swift’s figures are 10,500 miles from the surface and 10
hours revolution period, whereas the true Figures are 3,700 miles and 7.65
hours. Remarkable remains the fact that for the inner satellite Swift
assumed a period of revolution, though not what it is, but shorter than the
Martian period of rotation, which is true. However, Swift did not know the
rotational period of Mars and therefore he was not aware of the uniqueness
of his figure. If he were to calculate as an astronomer should, he would
either have decreased the distance separating the inner satellite from Mars
- a distance for which he gave
thrice its true value - or increased its revolution period to comply with
the Keplerian laws by assuming the specific weight of Mars as comparable
with that of Earth. But Swift had no ambitions toward scientific inquiry in
his satirical novel.


References

1. The reference is found in the collected works of Kepler (Astronomica
opera omnia, ed. C. Frisch, vol. VI, p. 557) published in 1866.