Immanuel Velikovsky
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==Earth in Upheaval== | ==Earth in Upheaval== | ||
| − | Velikovsky's 1955 book ''Earth In Upheaval'' strove to do for geology what ''Worlds in Collision'' had done for astronomy. Attempting to collect the 'physical evidence' for the planetary billiards described in the former, the book espoused an extreme form of geological [[catastrophism]] (i.e. that the majority of the Earth's geological features had been formed within timescales of hours, days or weeks, rather than gradually over "millions of years"). Volcanism, [[pole shift]]s, mass [[extinctions]], orogeny | + | Velikovsky's 1955 book ''Earth In Upheaval'' strove to do for geology what ''Worlds in Collision'' had done for astronomy. Attempting to collect the 'physical evidence' for the planetary billiards described in the former, the book espoused an extreme form of geological [[catastrophism]] (i.e. that the majority of the Earth's geological features had been formed within timescales of hours, days or weeks, rather than gradually over "millions of years"). Volcanism, [[pole shift]]s, mass [[extinctions]], orogeny were all grist to the mill, and doubtless music to the ears of 'young earth' [[creationists]] (although Velikovsky said that he was not questioning the conventional view of the age of the Earth). Whilst subsequent decades have seen catastrophist ideas gain some acceptance amongst the scientific community (such as a possible meteoric impact event at the [[Cretaceous]]-Tertary boundary causing extinction of the [[dinosaurs]]), the timescales and causes proposed by Velikovsky (near collisions with Venus and Mars in 1500 and 747 BC) continue to be regarded as ludicrous nonsense by the mainstream. Velikovsky spent a significant part of ''Earth in Upheaval'' attempting to rubbish the then relatively new theory of [[continental drift]], which he realised that if true could explain some of the geological phenomena he put down to catastrophes. As [[Stephen Jay Gould]] has pointed out, Velikovsy's objections were shared at the time by some mainstream geologists, i.e. that there was no mechanism to explain continental drift, but this problem has now been resolved. |
==The Velikovsky Affair & the cult of the martyred heretic== | ==The Velikovsky Affair & the cult of the martyred heretic== | ||
Revision as of 22:51, 25 June 2012
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Immanuel Velikovsky (1895–1979) was a Russian Jewish psychiatrist who in later life emigrated to the USA and embarked upon a second career as a self-styled iconoclast, polymath, and 'intellectual heretic' with some gobsmackingly unorthodox theories. Of peculiar breadth in scope, his ideas centred around reinterpretation of events in the Old Testament as historical fact, but with God seemingly replaced by a catastrophist scenario of 'interplanetary billiards', involving near-collisions between the Earth, Venus, and Mars. Following a canny previewing in Reader's Digest and Harper's Magazine which piqued the curiosity of the biblically-aware US public, his book Worlds in Collision (1950) became a best-seller. A dense tome, it was written in the persuasive style of a lawyer's summing up, and bolstered with innumerable footnote references to academic literature purporting to support Velikovsky's point of view, arguing its case in a way which seemed remarkably convincing to many a layman. Controversy reigned when the book's publisher (Macmillan) was forced to tear up Velikovsky's contract and pulp the book when it was top of the best-seller list, due to the ire of scientific community who threatened to boycott Macmillan's textbooks if it did not stop peddling what they regarded as egregious bullshit. However, Velikovsky's contract was snapped up by a rival publisher, and half a dozen other books in similar style followed over the next two decades, accompanied by copious lecture tours enthusiastically attended by his fans. Meanwhile academic consensus remained firm in almost unilaterally rejecting Velikovsky's work as impossible woo.
Contents |
Zionism
One less explored aspect of the Velikovsky affair is that his wild and infamous theories were arguably fuelled by his Zionist political leanings. His books strove to validate the Hebrew bible, in two main ways:
- Rewriting History. By the early 20th century, archeology could find precious little evidence of the events described in the old testament. For instance Solomon's magnificent temple and Jericho's walls (allegedly knocked over by trumpet blasts) seemed conspicuous by their absence in the stratigraphic record. Velikovsky took it upon himself to declare the accepted chronology of the Near and Middle East to be erroneous, and offered his own cut-and-pasted version, shifting and realigning centuries of Egyptian and Greek history to match the Hebrew bible.
- Rewriting Celestial Mechanics. Velikovsky sought to explain various supernatural events described in the Old Testament (e.g. Noah's flood, the zapping of the Tower of Babel, the Plagues visited upon Egypt as Moses led the Exodus…) as being real physical events, caused by planetary billiards.
Velikovsky's Zionism is a matter of record. In 1923, working in Berlin, he published two inaugural volumes of an academic journal entitled Scripta Universitatis atque Bibliothecae Hierosolymitanarum, containing papers by various Jewish academics, and with the kudos of an editorial by Albert Einstein. The journal was then used by the fledgling Hebrew University of Jerusalem to help set up its library, by offering copies of its Scripta to other universities in exchange for their publications. Velikovsky settled in Palestine during the 1920s/30s and practiced medicine and psychiatry, before emigrating to New York to work as a psychoanalyst. In 1947 he began writing a regular Zionist editorial for the New York Post, under the pseudonymn 'Observer' [1]. Although even the writings of conventional historians can sometimes reflect the concerns of their own time, in places Ages in Chaos now reads like the product of a time when the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel were a very recent memory.
Worlds in Collision
Worlds in Collision (1950) was Velikovsky's first book, and his biggest seller. A remarkable work of bullshit, it reads rather like some kind of elaborate drama-documentary. The narrative begins at the biblical tale of Moses leading the Isrealites from Egypt, with plagues, parting Red Seas, columns of fire, and manna raining from heaven, and proceeds through various Old Testament bible stories (e.g. the sun standing still for Joshua). In some rather eye-watering leaps of imagination, Velikovsky uses (wait for it) comparative mythology to painstakingly argue his case that these biblical events were real, and happened not just in the Near East but all over the world, and are described in the legends, religions, and writings of other cultures too. The best bit of all is his conclusions as to the cause of the events: PLANETARY BILLARDS. Yes, in 1500BC, Venus nearly collided with the Earth, causing pole shifts and general mass catastrophe. In 747 BC, he claims Mars did likewise. Upon reading such suggestions, of course, the scientific community choked on its coffee and tried to explain to Dr Velikovksy that it did not matter what ancient legends said: such events were physically impossible. In short, comparative mythology was not a valid way to perform research into astrophysics, as it neglected such small matters as the conservation of angular momentum. One of the reasons Vekikovsky's woo was so popular was that, to the non-scientific layman, his vast confabulations of meticulously footnoted historical and mythic sources seemed rather erudite and convincing. However later scrutiny of his use of sources by specialists in cuneiform, Egyptology, etc., tended to be more of the opinion that Velikovsky indulged in a helluva lot of selective quoting, recontextualisation, and mistranslation when weaving his sources, and they frequently did not support his case to anywhere near the extent he contended. Moreover, he would often cite sources as contemporaneous when they were actually from different centuries or even millennia.
An earlier unpublished book was all set to blame Global flood on Saturn and the destruction of the Tower of Babel on a near miss with Mercury, whilst Venus was alleged to have been ejected as a monstrous comet from Jupiter.
While Velikovsky continues to have followers (including the notorious internet kook Ted Holden), his teachings can be quite easily rejected on their face for a number of reasons. Among other things, he made very few testable predictions, and produced much butchered science:
- No mechanism was ever offered to eject Venus from Jupiter, and current science shows no way to do this without expending impossible amounts of energy or disrupting the rather complex Jovian orbital system, including its rings and many moons. Velikovsky also does not explain why a body consisting mostly of hydrogen would eject one whose geology much more closely resembles that of Earth in this odd game of planetary pinball. In addition, we know what comets are; scientists most succinctly refer to them as "dirty snowballs", blobs of water ice, rock, and organics. Venus is a rocky planet with a stable orbit, with no comet-like qualities save a large amount of water gas in the atmosphere (although comets don't really have much of an atmosphere). How this is supposed to emerge from Jupiter of all places is baffling. How Venus is supposed to change from a comet to a planet is also unexplained.
- In attempting to explain the fall of manna in the story of the Exodus, Velikovsky routinely confused hydrocarbons with carbohydrates, a mistake that should be impossible for any person with a high school education in chemistry.
- Velikovsky also butchered his mythology, twisting known historical chronology and making elementary mistakes such as conflating the goddesses Aphrodite and Athena to explain the origin of the myth of Athena's birth from a hole in Zeus' head cut by the
HephesteusHapfastussHephaestus, the god of fire.
Ages in Chaos
1952's Ages in Chaos was the first in a series of books where, to the derision of pretty much every archeologist and ancient historian in tenure, Velikovksy attempted to single-handedly rewrite the chronology of the Near and Middle East. His motivation for doing so was largely that there appeared to be no archeological evidence whatsoever for the events described in the Old Testament, and he wanted to 'correct' this. He argued that the chronology of Egypt, with its Old, Middle and New Kingdoms and dynastic lists of Pharaohs had been taken as the yard stick against which that of the rest of the region was matched against. However, he pointed out that these dynastic lists were settled upon by Egyptologists before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the deciphering of hieroglyphics, and also relied upon Sothic dating (relating to cycles of the star Sirius) which he "debunked" as total woo! Instead, Velikovsky claimed that several of the dynasties in the list were duplicates of each other - the same history, duplicated in Greek or Persian/Assyrian sources. This had caused, he argued, phantom 'dark ages' in Greece and duplicate historical figures who were simply 'alter egos' of each other (for example, he equated the biblical 'Queen of Sheba' as the same person known in Egyptian records as Queen Hatshepsut).
As usual, his scheme seemed well-researched and plausible to laymen, but batshit insane to academics in the field. In particular, his misuse of cuneiform sources was utterly torn to shreds by Abraham Sachs at Brown University in 1965, and Velikovsky was never able to refute the charges. Whilst his scheme had some plausible and attractive features in placing Moses and the Exodus in 12th Dynasty Egypt, it fell apart at the later stages (requiring, for instance, the Hittites to be considered "alter egos" of the Babylonians). Velikovksy failed to publish all five volumes of his Ages in Chaos series, with the last two volumes (Ramses II and His Time and Peoples of the Sea) slipping out in the two years before his death, and the middle part of the scheme remaining unpublished. This did not, however, stop legions of other armchair scholars coming up with their own ever-more-wacky chronological revisions for years to come.
Earth in Upheaval
Velikovsky's 1955 book Earth In Upheaval strove to do for geology what Worlds in Collision had done for astronomy. Attempting to collect the 'physical evidence' for the planetary billiards described in the former, the book espoused an extreme form of geological catastrophism (i.e. that the majority of the Earth's geological features had been formed within timescales of hours, days or weeks, rather than gradually over "millions of years"). Volcanism, pole shifts, mass extinctions, orogeny were all grist to the mill, and doubtless music to the ears of 'young earth' creationists (although Velikovsky said that he was not questioning the conventional view of the age of the Earth). Whilst subsequent decades have seen catastrophist ideas gain some acceptance amongst the scientific community (such as a possible meteoric impact event at the Cretaceous-Tertary boundary causing extinction of the dinosaurs), the timescales and causes proposed by Velikovsky (near collisions with Venus and Mars in 1500 and 747 BC) continue to be regarded as ludicrous nonsense by the mainstream. Velikovsky spent a significant part of Earth in Upheaval attempting to rubbish the then relatively new theory of continental drift, which he realised that if true could explain some of the geological phenomena he put down to catastrophes. As Stephen Jay Gould has pointed out, Velikovsy's objections were shared at the time by some mainstream geologists, i.e. that there was no mechanism to explain continental drift, but this problem has now been resolved.
The Velikovsky Affair & the cult of the martyred heretic
Velikovsky was adept at bolstering his cult status amongst devotees, helping his books to become best-sellers. A skillful self-propagandist, his chief tactic was to portray himself as the victim of an academic dirty-tricks campaign, and that his ideas were not being given a 'fair hearing' by universities. A substantial amount of writings were devoted to his own hagiography in this respect (e.g. Stargazers & Gravediggers), however more often he would persuade other friends with letters after their names to write pieces on his behalf. More often than not, these academics would come to Velikovsky's defense in an area outside their own field - historians and linguists asking for a fair hearing for his physics, and geologists for his history. Velikovsky was also keen to namedrop his acquaintance with Einstein.
Particular capital was made out of the actions of the astronomy faculty at Harvard University, led by Harlow Shapley. Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision was initially published in 1950 by Macmillan, and became an runaway bestseller. Shapley threatened to organise a US-wide boycott of Macmillian's textbooks if they did not drop the book. Macmillian duly caved in and within months had transferred Velikovsky's contract to Doubleday.
By the early 70s, Velikovsky was claiming that findings from NASA's Mariner space probes (e.g. that Venus was hot) provided confirmation of his theories. In an era of hippiedom, free love, and anti-Vietnam protests, these claims were finding enthusiastic support across US campuses, with Velikovsky milking support in a series of sellout lecture tours. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) became sufficiently alarmed by the levels of rising woo that they staged a special conference on the matter in 1974. Poor Velikovksy thought the event was to be a serious examination of his theories, but the AAAS had other ideas, clearly intending it more as a grand debunking. They assigned showbiz astronomer Carl Sagan to lead the attack, who proceeded to deliver a rollicking demolition of Velikovsky's work to the amassed audience. This rather backfired however, as Sagan, underestimating the dedication of the faithful, had allowed himself the liberty of including few flip strawmen in his talk (e.g. claiming Velikovsky had written of 'plagues of frogs falling to Earth from Venus') and handwaving schoolboy errors in his maths. These details were merely seized upon by the Velikovsky fanbase, allowing them to ignore the big-picture impossibility and instead quibble with the details for years to come. The planned debunking was held up as yet another example of establishment suppression of a academic martyr.
Current supporters and legacy
Velikovksy's followers today can generally be grouped into three main areas:
Planetary billiards
Despite all this utter bullshit, Velikovsky's legacy lives to this day: his planetary billiards paved the way to Zecharia Sitchin's planet Nibiru, which in turn mutated into Nancy Lieder's Planet X, which is one of the contenders for the current 2012 end-of-the-world scare. Internet crank Robert W. Felix has piled a good deal of his own nonsense on top of Velikovsky's pseudo-scholarship. However we may hope, this won't disappear after December 22. Another fantastic development of Velikovsky's planetary science centres around Saturn, and the novel notion that Earth orbited it within human memory, before the Sun came along and spoilt everything.
Electric Universe
Velikovsky's ideas are arguably the origin of the various Electric Universe claims, a fertile area generally centred on the notion that electromagnetism is the dominant force in the cosmos, and gravity is not.
Alternative chronologies
Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos series provided a starting point for a plethora of armchair scholars to devise new and exciting chronologies for Egypt, the Near and Middle East, and even Europe. The general methodology is to claim that "dark ages" in the historical record are imaginary, and arise from bogus falsely-inflated dynasty lists and the like, which contain made-up centuries containing rulers who never existed. Another trick is to claim that historical figures listed in the annals of different sources (e.g. writings of Greeks such as Herodotus, versus Egyptian hieroglyphics) are actually "alter-egos" of each other, and correspond to the same people, rather than different rulers from different centuries.
Proponents have even made it to successful TV series and books, such as the 'New Chronology' of David Rohl. Other names in the field include Gunnar Heinsohn and Peter James (author of Centuries of Darkness). Much use is made of obscure Assyrian king lists and Pharaohs.
The major difficulty with these methods is that they tend to focus facile comparisons of names and dynasties, which gloss over the detailed archeological evidence from the ground, or mundane information about everyday life in these periods which show clearly that the proposed chronologies are bullshit.
A particularly extreme version of these methodologies sees claims that there are 'phantom centuries' in the history of AD Europe. A popular notion is that the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne did not exist. Writers such as Herbert Illig and Gunnar Heinsohn have peddled ideas arguing that many of the years between the fall of the Roman Empire and circa 1200 AD simply did not exist. To support this, they claim that there was a vast continent-wide conspiracy to fabricate historical documents and chronicles. It is not entirely clear what was to be gained from such wholesale deceit.
Trumping all of this is Russian writer Fomenko, who manages to go so far in truncating history that he claims the Great Wall of China was not built until the 1950s. It is not unusual for their theories to be apparently motivated by strains of nationalism.
Velikovsky has been referred to as one of the "most suppressed scientists who could have made a tremendous impact on all of us, of the last 200 years"[2], along with Hahnemman, Tesla, Maxwell, and Royal Rife. When we look at the modern world, Tesla (although under-appreciated in his own time) and Maxwell did have a tremendous impact on all of us: the fact that you're reading this on a computer powered by an alternating current of electricity testifies towards this. Hahnemann's pet theory wasn't suppressed, worked for some time[3], and was discarded by proper medicine when Pasteur's alternative came along. Rife's experiments could not be independently replicated by the scientific community when they tried to, hence why Rife was discredited.
External links
- An example of the sort of cranks that support Velikovsky
- talk.origins' Catastrophism FAQ (deals with both Velikovsky and Holden)
- talk.origins on Velikovsky, many arguments collected by Jim Meritt
Footnotes
- ↑ http://www.varchive.org/obs/obspref.htm
- ↑ http://www.addebook.com/tech/astronomy-geography/worlds-in-collision_13489.html
- ↑ Homeopathy did nothing, being just water and/or alcohol, reducing the symptoms of disease to those of the disease itself. Other medical practices in 1810 when homeopathy was founded would inadvertently although actively harm the patient.