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Velikovsky

Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, [1]University of Wisconsin
- Green Bay
First-time Visitors: Please visit [2]Site Map and Disclaimer. Use
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A Note to Visitors

I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you
want to take issue with any position expressed here, you first have to
answer this question:

_What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?_

I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this
question. Refutability is one of the classic determinants of whether a
theory can be called scientific. Moreover, I have found it to be a
great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determine
whether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just
playing mind games. Note, by the way, that _I_ am assuming the burden
of proof here - all you have to do is commit to a criterion for
testing. It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are
you open-minded enough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
_________________________________________________________________

Literary Disasters

One of the most celebrated literary disasters of recent time is the
story of _A Confederacy of Dunces_, a book that was rejected by two
dozen publishers before it was printed--and won the 1981 Pulitzer
Prize. The success did the author, John Kennedy Toole, no good.
Despondent over his repeated failures to find a publisher, he had
committed suicide. The book was submitted to a publisher by his family
and published posthumously.

In 1950 another publishing disaster of a different order occurred.
Another author, rejected more than a dozen times, finally found a
publisher. Unlike _A Confederacy of Dunces_, which was a work of merit
that was too long neglected, this book was a work of no merit that was
hailed as a masterpiece. The author was Immanuel Velikovsky, and the
book was _Worlds in Collision_.

Who Was Velikovsky?

Velikovsky supporters are fairly vociferous and this page has
generated a number of exchanges. Thus, interspersed with my original
comments are additional notes inspired by some of these exchanges. To
any future correspondents, I repeat, respond to the challenge I raise
above. If you expect me to be persuaded by Velikovsky, you should be
able to tell me what you would accept as refutation of his ideas. Are
you open-minded enough to accept that possibility?

Immanuel Velikovsky was born in Vitebsk, Russia in 1895. After
receiving his medical degree, he practiced in Europe and Palestine,
then studied psychiatry in Vienna under a pupil of Freud, His
involvement with Jewish scholarly journals brought him into contact
with Albert Einstein, and the two became lifelong friends.
(Velikovsky's supporters refer often to favorable comments Einstein
made about Velikovsky, but Einstein had a history of being gulled into
embarrassing positions by people eager to use his reputation. Also,
one can easily imagine Einstein not wanting to embarrass a good
friend. Finally, for all his brilliance in physics, Einstein was
simply not very well-informed on astronomy, geology or archaeology,
the fields where Velikovsky's errors are most glaring.) Shortly before
World War II, Velikovsky came to the U. S. For unknown reasons, he did
not enter medical practice but seems to have become a librarian and
custodian at Columbia University. (Velikovsky supporters dispute this
but Velikovsky himself said that for ten years he "daily opened and
closed the Library at Columbia University.") With easy access to a
vast library and plenty of time to read, Velikovsky immersed himself
in ancient history. He had already been struck by the similarities
between the life of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton and the Greek
legend of Oedipus, King of Thebes. In conventional chronology,
Akhenaton predates the Oedipus legend by centuries.

Akhenaton, incidentally, has been rather romanticized by modern
writers. He attempted to do away with the Egyptian pantheon (and the
political power of the priests) and institute the worship of a single
god, Aton. He appeals both to our monotheistic ideals and our
admiration for those who take on the Establishment. Unfortunately, the
resemblance between Akhenaton and the ideals we value most in our own
culture is superficial at best. Aton-worship was a cold, sterile
elitist nature worship. The god in Egyptian myth who heard the plea of
the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed was Amon, but Amon was the
chief target of Akhenaton's "reform." Akhenaton sought to institute an
austere religion that would appeal to the upper-class elite while
suppressing the major source of solace to the lower classes. Even the
Old Testament, not noted for its tolerance of other religions, seems
much more restrained in its attitude toward Egyptian beliefs than it
is of other religions, like those of Assyria.

If, as Velikovsky thought, the legend of Oedipus describes Akhenaton,
then the established chronologies of the ancient Near East might be
seriously in error. Could there be a connection between the erroneous
chronologies and the catastrophe stories of the Book of Exodus and the
legends of other cultures? Velikovsky found apparent support for this
idea in the writings of an Egyptian, Ipuwer, who described turmoil in
Egypt in terms very similar to the Book of Exodus. In conventional
chronology Ipuwer dates from 500 years after Exodus and is describing
a period of political upheaval entirely different from the plagues in
the Book of Exodus. Velikovsky became convinced Ipuwer and Exodus were
describing a single great natural catastrophe. The result was _Worlds
in Collision_.

Worlds in Collision

The general thesis of _Worlds in Collision_ is that the Earth
underwent vast cataclysms in early historic times. The planet Venus,
says Velikovsky, is only 3500 years old. It was expelled as a comet
from Jupiter, creating the Great Red Spot as a sort of Caesarian scar,
then repeatedly passed close to Earth, stopping its rotation,
re-starting it, changing its axial tilt, causing the Plagues of Egypt,
the parting of the Red Sea, and other disasters chronicled in the
world's mythologies. The geologic effects on the Earth were, as one
might imagine, immense: tsunamis, great movements of the crust,
earthquakes, vast outpourings of lava. Organic chemicals drifted down
from Venus to supply the Israelites with manna and fill the world's
oil reservoirs. (Golda Meir, late Prime Minister of Israel, once
remarked that it took Moses forty years to lead the Hebrews through
the desert to the only place in the Middle East that had no oil!)
Finally, Venus settled down into the most circular orbit of any of the
planets. A few centuries later, Mars went on a smaller rampage,
passing close to Earth and causing various disasters. Velikovsky
developed these theories at length in _Worlds in Collision_ and its
sequels, _Earth in Upheaval_ and _Ages in Chaos_.

The Response to Velikovsky

Velikovsky's images of great catastrophes and sweeping events,
skipping from place to place and culture to culture, had a vast
appeal. Not only did the public like _Worlds in Collision_, but even
sober literary critics like Horace Kallen, Clifton Fadiman, Fulton
Oursler and John J. O'Neill acclaimed its scope and drama. To American
science, under attack by Joe McCarthy's Congressional committee and
swamped by a wave of pseudoscience that included the big post-war
flying saucer craze and would later spawn the Bridey Murphy
reincarnation  mania as well, the public and literary acclaim for
Velikovsky was the last straw. Harlow Shapley, a noted Harvard
astronomer, informed Macmillan Publishers that he would no longer
publish his astronomy text through them as long as they published
_Worlds in Collision_. Other scientists followed suit. Embarrassed,
Macmillan turned the rights to _Worlds in Collision_ over to
Doubleday, which by now had an instant best-seller on its hands.

Scientists are nearly unanimous now that the boycott of Macmillan was
a tactical disaster. The controversy guaranteed that _Worlds in
Collision_ would top the charts and it cast Velikovsky in the role of
persecuted genius, oppressed and censored by an unimaginative
establishment. No one, however, not even Shapley, ever suggested that
Velikovsky be censored or prevented from publishing. The issue was how
Velikovsky should publish. Macmillan owed its reputation as a
publisher in part to the work of authors like Shapley, and customers
had come to expect high standards of quality from their scholarly
works. Yet _Worlds in Collision_ was never reviewed by a scientist,
and to publish it under conditions that might lead the general public
to think it belonged on the same level as Macmillan's other academic
works was a serious lapse of publishing standards bordering on fraud.
The "good" news, if you can call it that, is that a similar boycott
today would be answered with "don't let the door hit you on the way
out." Publishers have discovered that junk science is so lucrative
that they would not hesitate to dump a reputable work if they were
presented with an ultimatum.

The Physical Evidence

Could Velikovsky's ideas be true? How can we test them? If there were
some obvious physical mechanism for moving planets around and changing
their rotations the way Velikovsky claims, we might have reason to
believe him. It would take as much energy as the Sun emits in a year
to expel Venus from Jupiter. The normal laws of planetary motion are
known well enough for us to send spacecraft to Saturn and beyond,
arriving only a few miles off target and a few seconds off schedule
after a trip of a billion miles and years in duration, but the normal
laws of planetary motion will not move planets the way Velikovsky says
they moved. Velikovsky postulated electromagnetic forces, but there is
no known way such forces could originate in the Solar system. There
are many thousands of known double stars in orbit around one another,
but we have never seen any undergo the sort of violent orbital changes
Velikovsky claims took place in our solar System. The laws of physics
offer little encouragement to Velikovsky.

If electromagnetic forces can affect the orbits of the planets, it's
very unlikely that they turn on and then completely off. There ought
to be at least some effect now. The orbits of interplanetary
spacecraft would be observably affected if that were so, The _Pioneer _
spacecraft, beyond the orbit of Pluto, are deviating very slightly
from their predicted path, a deviation that seems due to the way they
re-radiate heat from the distant Sun. Even a miniscule electromagnetic
effect would be noticed, if it existed.

Is there physical evidence for the catastrophes? There are large areas
where lava has covered vast expanses, such as the Columbia Plateau of
the U.S. or the Deccan region of western India. Often, though, the
lava flows are separated by layers of soil formed by weathering or
water-laid sediment, indicating a long interval between flows. The
flows were laid down in a short time geologically, but a long time in
human terms. A thousand lava flows over a million years comes to one
every thousand years. Velikovsky cites these lava flows as evidence,
but the physical evidence itself says no. Radiometric dating places
the Columbia flows 15 million years ago and the Deccan flows about 70
million, not 3500 years ago. Nowhere on the earth is there evidence
for vast volcanic outpourings, floods, tsunamis or fracturing of the
crust 3500 years ago.

Catastrophe Myths

What evidence, then, is there? The principal line of evidence, and the
one that persuades many people, is Velikovsky's vast array of legends.
Like many a Biblical fundamentalist, Velikovsky interprets, adds, and
deletes liberally while insisting he is adhering literally to the
evidence. Legends of horned monsters in the sky are interpreted as
references to the crescent Venus seen at close range; scaly celestial
beings are assumed to refer to cratered planets, and so on. A major
embarrassment to Velikovsky (and believers in the Biblical Deluge) is
the absence of flood legends from Africa. Velikovsky the psychiatrist
interprets this absence as "collective scotoma" (blind spot), a
collective amnesia designed to repress the memory of a great trauma.
Omitted details have been suppressed or forgotten, extraneous details
are later additions, and so on. Given such an array of data and
freedom to interpret, the legends can be made to fit any theory.

Certain legendary themes do crop up around the world, and disaster
legends are common. Some, like the Native American legends connected
with Crater Lake, correspond closely enough to an actual geologic
catastrophe to be possible accounts of the event. Many catastrophe
myths undoubtedly recall real but local disasters. We should also not
discount the possibility that the legends are ingenious
interpretations, attempts to explain how a remarkable landscape
feature came to be. Primitive peoples may lack advanced technology,
but they're not stupid. (Indeed, a subtle racism pervades most
historical pseudoscience - pre-technological peoples were too dumb to
have any ingenious or creative ideas.) Legends also travel by
diffusion; everyone likes a good adventure story, all the more so if
the story-teller adds local color. Hardly a year goes by that some
radio station doesn't do a remake of _War of The Worlds_, adapted for
its listening area. The book by H. G. Wells originally described an
attack on England, the famous 1939 broadcast put the landing outside
New York, and every major city in the U.S. has been "attacked" since.
Every good story-teller likes to add to his repertoire, and there's no
reason ancient story-tellers should have been any different. They were
no less adaptive and inventive than we.

The problem with using legends is that they can be interpreted in so
many ways. Scientific creationists use much of Velikovsky's material
in support of the Biblical Deluge. As science writer Isaac Asimov
pointed out, legends of talking animals are as common as catastrophe
myths. If we accept the catastrophe myths as literally true, then is
it not also possible that animals once could talk? If the talking
animal stories are inventions, why not the catastrophe stories? Here
again we encounter the double standard of the pseudoscientist; we have
two types of myths with no apparent reason to prefer one above the
other, yet one is promoted arbitrarily to the level of scientific
evidence while the other is relegated to the status of mere
imagination.

But Velikovsky makes it all look so _consistent_. Surely he couldn't
put all those legends together so neatly unless his theory was true?
Variations on this theme come up with just about every type of
pseudoscience. The startling truth is that theories that hang together
pretty well logically and are reasonably consistent with most of the
evidence are a dime a dozen in science. Its easy--anyone can construct
one. The key to the problem lies in the qualifiers "pretty well,"
"reasonably consistent ," and "most of the evidence." The difference
between a mediocre theory and a good one is that the good theory is as
nearly as possible _entirely consistent_ with _all_ the evidence. You
can make any theory look good if you are free to disregard or
rearrange key bits of evidence. All you have to do is rearrange the
chronology of the Near East and deny conventional dating methods and
you can come up with a marvelously consistent catastrophe theory. A
successful theory also provides sound reasons for choosing it over
rival theories; it either shows that the rival theories contain fatal
flaws, or it so far outperforms them that there is no longer any
comparison. Velikovsky meets none of these criteria: he has to deny or
evade well-established scientific findings, he gives us no reason for
accepting his interpretation of the legends over many other equally
plausible interpretations, and his theory is not so far superior to
existing theories that we should choose it despite its flaws.

One of the fundamental problems revealed by Velikovsky's work is that
_most people seem to have no idea what constitutes a logical proof._
Velikovsky himself seems not to. Nowhere in any of Velikovsky's works
do we find anything remotely like a really rigorous proof.
Velikovsky's method, which is like that of many scientists, is what
one writer termed "the method of multiply convergent irrelevancies."
Velikovsky piles up myths and physical evidence that he claims is of
catastrophic origin as if that, in itself, constitutes proof. A real
proof that myths reflect real events would include a complete listing
of cultures examined, themes found in their nature myths, and mention
of any contrary myths or significant omissions. The myths would be
presented _in context_ so that it would be clear what exactly each
culture really meant by the myths. This data would all be available
and documented so that scientists with other interpretations could
evaluate the data. Then there would be a comprehensive listing of
physical evidence relevant to the hypothesis, _including contrary
evidence. _Contrary evidence would have to be explained (not explained
away or ignored) or reconciled with the hypothesis. In particular,
there ought to be many local natural features where the physical
origin and the local traditions about the formation of the feature are
consistent. Would this be a massive effort? Yes, but given the ten
years Velikovsky put into his works, it could have been done.

Successful Predictions?

Velikovsky's fans have pointed to a large number of allegedly
successful predictions by Velikovsky. However, on closer examination,
there's a lot less to these predictions than meets the eye. For one
thing, many of Velikovsky's predictions are only vaguely related to
later events. Discoveries of interplanetary and galactic magnetic
fields are supposed to vindicate Velikovsky. After all, he did
speculate that electromagnetic forces played a role in altering the
orbits of the planets at a time when few astronomers paid much
attention to magnetic fields. Velikovsky speculated widely, and his
followers sometimes insist that Velikovsky deserves credit for any
discovery made in any field on which he ever speculated. However,
interplanetary magnetic fields are very weak: they can affect the
motions of charged particles emitted from the Sun, but the evidence
for magnetic fields capable of altering the motion of a planet
radically in a matter of days or even years is exactly the same as it
was when Worlds in Collision was first published: zero.

Recent tracking of the _Pioneer_ and _Voyager_ spacecraft has revealed
extremely tiny departures in their trajectory from a perfectly
Newtonian trajectory. Some physicists have suggested that there might
be a new kind of physical force at work. However, since no deviations
have showed up in the paths of the planets, it seems that the cause
lies in the spacecraft themselves. The best guess is that the
spacecraft radiate heat asymmetrically, resulting in a tiny extra
thrust on one side (and it's _tiny_). Surely if electrical and
magnetic fields affect the orbits of the planets, it ought to be
happening to some extent all the time, and it would take only a very
tiny effect to be measurable in the motions of the planets.

Velikovsky's supporters refer again and again to Velikovsky's address
to the Princeton Graduate College Forum on October 14, 1953, in which
he predicted, eighteen months before the actual discovery, that
Jupiter should emit radio waves. Remarkably, they never quote what
Velikovsky actually said during what is supposed to have been one of
his greatest moments. Ferte' refers to the discovery of radio
emissions from Jupiter, "supposedly a cold body encased in thousands
of miles of ice." Evidently Velikovsky expected Jupiter to emit radio
waves for the same reason Venus does--because it is hot. Any object
above absolute zero will emit radio waves, so a "prediction" of this
sort is a safe, so-what prediction. Jupiter actually emits radio waves
because charged particles from the Sun are trapped and accelerated by
Jupiter's magnetic field. Velikovsky no more foresaw this discovery
than anyone else. In no sense of the word did Velikovsky make a real
prediction. Here again we find a total absence of anything resembling
a rigorous, step-by-step proof, or any evidence that Velikovsky and
his supporters understand what a real proof is. A real prediction that
Jupiter should emit radio waves would include a specific mention of
the physical process responsible, as well as observational or
theoretical reasons why that mechanism should be present on Jupiter.

What then is left for Velikovsky? He did predict Venus would be hotter
than anyone expected, and that's about all. Lynn Rose, one of
Velikovsky's staunch supporters, suggested three tests for evaluating
the validity of a theory.
* First, the overall logical simplicity or economy of the theory
compared with other theories. Here Velikovsky does poorly--he has
to deny conventional chronology and dating methods and invent
unknown forces to make the planets move in accord with his theory.
* Second, Rose suggests, the extent to which deductions based on the
theory turn out to be true. Here Velikovsky performed marginally.
Most of his "successes" are the result of after-the-fact
force-fitting by his followers.
* Finally, Rose postulates that there should be a general absence of
facts deducible from the theory that turn out to be false; no
false predictions. Here Velikovsky flounders hopelessly.

Scientific Bloopers

One recent correspondent asked me: "Please tell me who might have
influenced your opinion on the gentleman.". My reply:

I've obviously read what Martin Gardner, Isaac Asimov and Carl
Sagan, among others, have had to say about him, but basically I
reject Velikovsky because his science is junk. I don't need
somebody else to tell me whether something is good or bad science.
[This correspondent seems to feel I wouldn't regard Velikovsky as
bad science if I hadn't been told by some authority figure. I
consider the notion insulting.] For example, in the first few pages
of _Worlds in Collision_, Velikovsky describes the standard
paradigm of astronomy as saying that gravity pulls a planet toward
the Sun (true) but the gravitational pull is balanced by a "push"
(his word) outward. That's just plain incompetent. The planet's
inertia causes it to tend to move in a straight line. If you could
magically turn off gravity, the planet would fly off in a straight
line tangential to its orbit. Gravity pulls the planet inward, and
the balance between gravity and inertia keeps the planet in its
orbit. Nothing is "pushing" the planet outward. If Velikovsky wants
to challenge the existing paradigm, we ought at least to expect him
to describe the existing paradigm accurately. An error that gross
so early in the book tells me I'm dealing with junk, not science.

Velikovskians vilify Harlow Shapley for not reading Velikovsky's book.
But when a book contains obvious incompetencies that can be spotted
just at random, you don't need to read the whole thing to conclude
it's junk. We might call this the "pony fallacy" after the story of a
father who tries to cure his son's excessive optimism by giving him a
pile of manure for his birthday. The child gleefully starts digging in
it, saying "with all this manure, there's got to be a pony somewhere
around here!" In real life, when you find manure, it indicates only
the likely presence of more manure.

Offsetting Velikovsky's successful predictions are a host of wrong
predictions and outright errors of fact. Velikovsky claimed that
hydrocarbons from Venus' cometary tail fell to earth to form our
petroleum reservoirs. Despite the term "oil pool," petroleum does not
collect in low spots as Velikovsky's model predicts; it collects
_beneath_ impervious rocks as water in the pore spaces of rocks
flushes the oil _upward_. Velikovsky predicted Venus would have a
hydrocarbon-rich atmosphere. It does not; Venus' atmosphere is mostly
carbon dioxide. Velikovsky's supporters have amended his prediction
after the fact to Venus having _some_ hydrocarbons, but even this
prediction has not been borne out. Velikovsky claimed, according to
Ferte', that Mercury was of recent origin and was anomalously hot.
Mercury is not anomalously hot, and its rotation is locked to the
Sun--3 rotations for every two revolutions around the Sun. Such a
rotation lock could only have arisen if Mercury had been subject to
eons of tidal braking by the Sun. Mercury's day and night side
temperatures are exactly what we would expect on an airless world with
Mercury's rotation and distance from the Sun.

During his discussion of hydrocarbons, Velikovsky interjects
discussions of carbohydrates so casually that he creates the clear
impression he doesn't know the difference between the two. When Isaac
Asimov pointed this out in an essay, Velikovskians became furious. One
asked me how we know hydrocarbons can't naturally convert to
carbohydrates. The best answer is that if it did happen to any great
extent, who would care about oil spills? The hydrocarbons would
convert by some means or other to carbohydrates, be consumed by
organisms, and that would be that. Another problem: carbohydrates
contain oxygen, hydrocarbons don't. Most natural processes that
combine oxygen with hydrocarbons end up breaking them down to carbon
dioxide and water, not making carbohydrates. Surely if some purported
conversion process could operate on a scale capable of producing the
Israelites' manna, it should be happening all over the place. And a
thorough reading of the entire passage, in context, reveals not a
shred of evidence that Velikovsky realized there is a difference
between hydrocarbons and carbohydrates.

In a short article, entitled _When Was The Moon's Surface Last Molten?_
Velikovsky explains away ancient radiometric dates (three to four
billion years) on lunar rock samples. Velikovsky notes, correctly,
that heat does not affect the decay rates of radioactive atoms.
Therefore, he argues, the Moon' s surface could have been largely
molten only 3500 years ago without affecting radiometric ages! Now one
critical assumption in radiometric dating is that isotopes of a given
chemical element (say Strontium 86, 87, and 88) are uniformly mixed to
begin with. This is certainly true in a liquid, like molten rock, and
even true in solid rocks at high temperatures. Heating does not affect
the decay rates of atoms like Rubidium 87, which decays to Strontium
87, but it does redistribute isotopes uniformly. Essentially, melting
a rock resets the clock to zero, and the radiometric age of a rock is
the last time its isotopes were reshuffled. If the Moon had been
molten 3500 years ago, lunar samples would yield very young ages.
Velikovsky clearly does not understand radiometric dating.

Velikovsky inverted almost everything in planetary astronomy; the
orbits of planets are believed stable, so Velikovsky makes them
unstable. Astronomers believed Venus to be temperate and Jupiter cold,
so Velikovsky makes them both hot. The Moon is considered geologically
dead, so Velikovsky makes it recently active. The principal force on
the planets is said to be gravity, so Velikovsky invokes
electromagnetic fields, too. Since astronomy in 1950 (and every other
time as well) was imperfect, some generally-accepted ideas were bound
to be wrong. If you formulate a theory that controverts many
commonly-held ideas, you are certain to be able later on to point with
pride to some spectacular cases where you were right and the experts
were wrong, especially if you have a coterie of loyal fans who are
eager to accept anything even remotely correct as a successful
prediction. There will be many more cases where you were wrong, but
then, even the experts are wrong occasionally.

Recent history provides a good example of this sort of "success."
Historians are unanimous in saying Hitler's fanatical refusal to
retreat cost Germany dearly. They also generally agree that his
refusal to retreat from Moscow in the winter of 1941 saved the German
army from being routed. Did Hitler make a brilliant decision? It's far
more likely that he simply blundered into a situation where his normal
ineptitude happened purely by accident to coincide with reality. The
occasional successes of pseudoscientists are of exactly the same
variety.

Science Goofs Again

Having made a serious tactical error in the boycott of _Worlds in
Collision_, science compounded it in 1974 when the American
Association for the Advancement of Science held a symposium on
Velikovsky's theories. To Velikovsky's supporters the symposium was
variously an admission of guilt, an acknowledgment that Velikovsky's
ideas had profound effects, or a last attempt by the Establishment to
smash Velikovsky. The participants in the AAAS Symposium, held in
February, 1974, were Norman Storer, a sociologist; Peter Huber,
mathematician; Velikovsky; J. Derral Mulholland, a well-known
astronomer; Carl Sagan, an even better-known astronomer; and Irving
Michelson, aerospace engineer. Which side came out better depends on
whose account you read: the AAAS volume, entitled _Scientists Confront
Velikovsky_, or a pro-Velikovsky account by C. J. Ransom called _The
Age of Velikovsky_.

Viewer's of Carl Sagan's famous _Cosmos_ series are no doubt baffled
by a weird digression in Episode 4, _Heaven and Hell_, where Sagan
discusses Velikovsky briefly. _Cosmos_ was in production not long
after the AAAS symposium, and the memories were fresh in Sagan's mind.
However, the effect in _Cosmos_ is disjointed - viewers unfamiliar
with Velikovsky are left wondering "what was _that_ all about?"
There's not enough background given for viewers to understand the
topic. It's easily the worst editorial mistake in the whole series.

Velikovsky died November 17, 1980, saluted by Isaac Asimov as the
"Grand Old Man of the Fringe." A lively interest in Velikovsky
continued for some years after his death, especially in engineering
circles, and as noted earlier, he still has adherents. A poll
conducted by _Industrial Research_ in the early 1980's showed 80% of
the respondents believing that Velikovsky deserved more serious
attention.
_________________________________________________________________

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References

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