Immanuel Velikovsky, scientist or twit?

[darkbeaver]

http://www.aspden.org/arp/2005arp5.pdf
In his 1891 A.I.E.E. lecture at Columbia College, Tesla said in pertinent part (emphasis mine): "What is electricity, and what is magnetism? "...We are now confident that electric and magnetic phenomena are attributable to the ether, and we are perhaps justified in saying that the effects of static electricity are effects of ether in motion". "...we may speak of electricity or of an electric condition, state or effect". "...we must distinguish two such effects, opposite in character neutralizing each other". "...for in a medium of the properties of the ether, we cannot possibly exert a strain, or produce a displacement or motion of any kind, without causing in the surrounding medium an equivalent and opposite effect." "...its condition determines the positive and negative character." "We know that it acts like an incompressible fluid;" "...the electro-magnetic theory of light and all facts observed teach us that electric and ether phenomena are identical." "The puzzling behavior of the ether as a solid to waves of light and heat, and as a fluid to the motion of bodies through it, is certainly explained in the most natural and satisfactory manner by assuming it to be in motion, as Sir William Thomson has suggested." "Nor can anyone prove that there are transverse ether waves emitted from an alternate current machine; to such slow disturbances, the ether, if at rest, may behave as a true fluid."


‘Tesla maintained his belief in the aether as the source of all substance.
This, he thought, was the fundamental, unifying theory of physical things.
He was quite unable to accept Einstein’s theory of relativity and curved
space.’
‘The Secret of the Creative Vacuum’ by John Davidson [1]
‘
There is incontrovertible evidence, for example, from a number of sources,
that neither the gravitational ‘constant’ nor the speed of light in a vacuum
are constant after all. Since Einstein’s theory of relativity is founded upon
these two assumptions, if either one of them is shown to be incorrect, then
Einstein’s theory is seen to be more relative than he thought! In short, like
Newton’s observations, it would be wrong, as a fundamental model.’
‘The Secret of the Creative Vacuum’ by John Davidson [2]


‘It may come as a shock, but Einstein’s theory of relativity is not part of the
design of nuclear weapons! ...... High school science students are
conditioned to ridicule the concept of a nineteenth-century luminiferous
aether with eye-rolling and giggling. But is this a contemptible idea whencompared with the “new and improved” terminology of gravitational
masses “warping” the fabric of “space-time”?
‘A Dissident View of Relativity Theory’ by W.H.Cantrell [3]


‘Einstein plagiarized the work of several notable scientists in his 1905
papers on special relativity and E = Mc2, yet the physics community has
never bothered to set the record straight in the past century.’
‘Albert Einstein: Plagiarist of the Century’ by Richard Moody, Jr. [4]


‘Insofar as the theory is thought to explain the result of the Michelson
Morley experiment, I am inclined to agree with Soddy that it is a swindle;
and I do not think Rutherford would have regarded it as a joke had he
realized how it would retard the rational development of science’.
‘Relativity - Joke or Swindle?’ by L. Essen [5]

 

[darkbeaver]

Dynamic theory of gravity

Tesla published a prepared statement on his 81st birthday (July 10, 1937) critiquing Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. The following is a portion of that statement:

"... Supposing that the bodies act upon the surrounding space causing curving of the same, it appears to my simple mind that the curved spaces must react on the bodies, and producing the opposite effects, straightening out the curves. Since action and reaction are coexistent, it follows that the supposed curvature of space is entirely impossible - But even if it existed it would not explain the motions of the bodies as observed. Only the existence of a field of force can account for the motions of the bodies as observed, and its assumption dispenses with space curvature. All literature on this subject is futile and destined to oblivion. So are all attempts to explain the workings of the universe without recognizing the existence of the ether and the indispensable function it plays in the phenomena."
"My second discovery was of a physical truth of the greatest importance. As I have searched the entire scientific records in more than a half dozen languages for a long time without finding the least anticipation, I consider myself the original discoverer of this truth, which can be expressed by the statement: There is no energy in matter other than that received from the environment." — Nikola Tesla​

While this statement asserted that Tesla had "worked out a dynamic theory of gravity" that he soon hoped to give to the world, he reportedly died before he publicized the details. There is still a halo of mystery around his death - even the exact date is not certain. It is speculated that his death may have been caused by too much "pressure" by agents in order to extract and obtain the secret documents regarding this theory.
Unfortunately few details were publicly revealed by Tesla about his theory. Available details argument against space being curved by gravitational effects, which leads some to believe Tesla failed to understand Einstein's theory is not about curved space at all, but curved space-time. However, there is disagreement about Tesla's exact understanding of Einstein's theories; Tesla was actively conducting tangible experiments during the time of Einstein's theoretical research. He underlined that time was a mere man-made reference used for convenience and as such the idea of a "curved space-time" was delusional, hence there was no basis for the Relativistic "space-time" binomium concept.
http://peswiki.com/index.php/PowerPedia:Tesla's_Dynamic_Theory_of_Gravity

 

[darkbeaver]

[SIZE=+1] This last paper by Shankland is most illuminating, as it contains quotes from Albert Einstein acknowledging the ether theory as a stumbling-block to his own relativity theory, and later thanking Shankland for his work in finally "disproving Miller". "Dear Dr. Shankland:
I thank you very much for sending me your careful study about the Miller experiments. Those experiments, conducted with so much care, merit, of course, a very careful statistical investigation. This is more so as the existence of a not trivial positive effect would affect very deeply the fundament of theoretical physics as it is presently accepted.
You have shown convincingly that the observed effect is outside the range of accidental deviations and must, therefore, have a systematic cause. You made it quite probable that this systematic cause has nothing to do with 'ether-wind', but has to do with differences of temperature of the air traversed by the two light bundles which produced the bands of interference. Such an effect is indeed practically inevitable if the walls of the laboratory room have a not negligible difference in temperature.
It is one of the cases where the systematic errors are increasing quickly with the dimension of the apparatus.
Congratulating you and your colleagues on your valuable contribution to our knowledge, I am
With kind regards,
A. Einstein" (31 August 1954)

(contained in Shankland, Applied Optics 1973, p.2283)


Robert S. Shankland, "Michelson and His Interferometer", Physics Today, April, 1974, pp. 37--43.

Obituary, R. S. Shankland, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 72(4), 1335 (1982).

It is interesting to contrast the above letter by Einstein to earlier discussions between Einstein and Miller. Below is the text of an article from the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper, 27 January 1926, published in Cleveland Ohio, home of the Case Western Reserve University where some of the original ether-drift experiments were undertaken. The article suggests there was a war of words going on between Albert Einstein and Dayton Miller, which modern historians have failed to adequately address. In particular, I would ask any reader to contact me at demeo(at)mind.net, if they know where copies of the letters between Einstein and Miller could be found, and also, where the various "press dispatches" mentioned in the article, from the University of Berlin, might have been published. The article suggests Einstein was irrationally dismissing Miller's work on ether-drift with the temperature argument, decades before the Shankland team attempted to do this in a more formal manner.

Dayton Miller and the Ether-Drift: Misc. Information
[/SIZE]

 

[darkbeaver]

"Gravitation is an electromagnetic phenomenon." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1946

"All planets revolve in approximately one plane. They revolve in a plane perpendicular to the lines of force of the sun’s magnetic field." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1946

Velikovsky was feared by powerfull concerns for practical reasons. He's been dead all these years but the fear won't go away.

 

[#juan]

AN ANTIDOTE TO VELIKOVSKIAN DELUSIONS

by Leroy Ellenberger​

This article first appeared in SKEPTIC Vol. 3 No. 4 1995
[brackets enclose subsequent additions]​

"The fact is that the whole of the ramshackle edifice of nonsense to be found scattered throughout the Velikovskian corpus is purported to have a historical…foundation, but that it has none." _John David North
"The philosopher David Hume urged that one should always hold it more likely that one had been deceived than that the laws of nature should stand suspended." _Frank Close
I am privileged to have this opportunity to provide a counterbalance to the Velikovskian mindset expressed by Mr. Cochrane [in "Velikovsky Still in Collision" (this issue)]. Our viewpoints could hardly be more divergent, as our respective essays for a forum in the British Velikovskian journal showed. Whereas he believes "the ancient traditions (mostly mythological) are our best guide to the appearance and arrangement of the earliest remembered Solar System, not some fancy computer's retrocalculations based upon current understandings of astronomical principles" (1992, pp. 40-41), my position is that "while myth may inform natural history, (e.g., Phaethon's fall), its capacity to reform physics is vanishingly small. Phaethon was almost certainly a comet, not Venus or the Sun" (1992a, pp. 41-44), as Bob Kobres has ingeniously shown (1995). In the Velikovskian worldview, typified by Mr. Cochrane, the zodiac has no meaning until Earth's present tilt was achieved. But, in fact, the earliest signs of the zodiac date from 5,500 B.C., long before Velikovskians believe the present order began (Gurshtein, 1993 and 1995). (Of special interest to Velikovskians is the fact that the near-miss trajectory for Phaethon behind Earth, deduced by Kobres, produces the illusion of a sun-like body standing still due to the relative motion as seen from certain longitudes--perhaps the inspiration for the "Day the Sun Stood Still" for Joshua. [See, too, "The Day the Sun Stood Still?" in Peter James & Nick Thorpe, _Ancient Mysteries_, 1999, pp. 135-153, relating this event to a the after-effects of a Tunguska-type aerial detonation.]) [As Phil Burns so cogently notes: "Myths tell us how the ancients perceived the universe, not necessarily how the universe really worked," which, as the following essay will show, Mr. Cochrane and his associates at kronia.com refuse to credit, possibly due to an invincible ignorance.]
Mr. Cochrane presents his case for Velikovsky's genius. Velikovsky was a brilliant man whose speculations, unfortunately, were invalidated by his assumpti

AN ANTIDOTE TO VELIKOVSKIAN DELUSIONS

 

[darkbeaver]

Yes the material, by weight alone, against Velikovsky is prodigious and impresses the uninformed innocent. The importance of skepticism is that it be brought to bear with an even appreciation of the demonstratable facts. In the vilification of Velikovsky this can effortlessly be shown to have been avoided in the majority of cases. We have already had the common sentiment expressed that Velikovskys correct predictions came about through erroneous reason. It could be argued that his propensity for correct guesswork is of the order of miraculous. So I guite rightly take it by his detractors own words that they are staunch religious people bent on maintenance of a pure unsullied church of cosmology and that Velikovsky stand accused of witchcraft by those same agents of dogma who seek a cultish posthumous contrition from the poor man. I don't think they'll get it, ever.

 

[Liberalman]

twit

 

[#juan]

Gravitation is an electromagnetic phenominum.............Bull

Newton’s law of universal gravitation
​

Liz Fox​

2-16-06​

A little review…
​

• Law 1: The orbit of a planet/comet about the Sun is an ellipse with the Sun's center of mass at one focus.
• Law 2: A line joining a planet/comet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal intervals of time
• Law 3: The ratio of the squares of the revolutionary periods for two planets is equal to the ratio of the cubes of their semimajor axes

http://www.edumedia.fr/m185_l2-newton-laws.html

Some background
​

• Copernicus- De revolutionibus orbium coelestium – 1543
• Kepler- Astronimia Nova – 1609
• Galileo- Sedereus Nuncius - 1610

Newton’s Principia
​

• Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
• Published in 1687
• Uses Kepler’s Laws to prove elliptical orbits
• Explains behavior of tides, precession of the equinoxes, and the irregularities in the moon’s orbit

Newton’s Astronomical Data and Deductions
​

• The planets orbiting Jupiter (Saturn) describe areas proportional to the times of descriptions; and their periodic times are as the 3/2th power of their distances from its center.
• The periodic times of the five primary planets are as the 3/2th power of their mean distances from the sun.

“The nature of the forces”
​

• The forces by which the primary planets are continually drawn off from rectilinear motions, and retained in their proper orbits, tend to the sun; and are inversely as the squares of the distances of the places of those planets from the sun’s center.

An Inverse-Square Law
​

• Centripetal vs. centrifugal
• Huygens- Horologium Oscillatorium (On Pendulum Clocks) - 1673

• When 2 identical bodies move with the same velocity on unequal circumferences, their [centripetal] forces are in the inverse proportion to their diameters
• When identical bodies move on unequal circumferences with unequal velocities the [centripetal] force of the faster is to that of the slower as the square of their velocities

Newton’s take
​

• The centripetal forces of bodies tend to the centers of the same circles; and are to each other as the squares of the arcs described in equal times divided respectively by the radii of the circles.

The Moon’s Centripetal Acceleration
​

• The moon gravitates towards the earth, and by the force of gravity is continually drawn off from a rectilinear motion, and retained in its orbit.
• It is solely the gravity of the earth that keeps the moon in orbit.

The Law of Gravitation for Point Masses
​

• Law of universal gravitation- there is a power of gravity pertaining to all bodies, proportional to the several quantities of matter which they contain.
• Henry Cavendish (1731-1810)
• Hypotheses non fingo

Gravitation for Extended Bodies
​

• Inside a homogeneous hollow spherical shell, a point mass experiences no net gravitational force
• Next, if a point mass is placed outside the shell, it is attracted to the exact center as if all of its mass were concentrated at a point
• Same for solid sphere of uniform density

Teachers' Domain: String Theory: Newton's Embarrassing Secret

Inertial and Gravitational Masses
​

• Inertial vs. Gravitational mass
• Inertial mass vs. weight – “The mass is known by the weight of each body, for it is proportional to the weight, as I have found by experiments on pendulums.”
• Kepler’s 3rd Law

A Final Thought
​

• “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”

Galileo discovered the 4 moons of Jupiter in 1610. Kepler believed that the planets were driven about by “spokes” of force.

The birth of the Principia may be traced back to a discussion in 1684 at the Royal Society. Astronomer Edmund Halley and architect Sir Christopher Wren suspected that there was an inverse square relation governing celestial motions based on Kepler's Third Law of elliptical orbits, but no one could prove it. They brought the question before Newton's arch rival Robert Hooke, who claimed that he could prove the inverse square law and all three of Kepler's laws. His claim was met with scepticism, and Wren offered a forty-shilling book as a prize for the correct proof within a two-month limit. Hooke failed to produce the calculation, and Halley travelled to Cambridge to ask for Newton's opinion. Newton responded with a typical lack of interest in work that he had already completed, that he had already solved the problem years before. He could not find the calculation among his papers and promised to send Halley a proof. Halley, suspecting the same bogus claim he had received from Hooke, left frustrated and returned to London. Three months later he received a nine page treatise from Newton, written in Latin, De Motu Corporum, or On the Motions of Bodies in Orbit. In it, Newton offers the correct proof of Kepler's laws in terms of an inverse square law of gravitation and his three laws of motion. Halley suggested publication, but Newton, reluctant to appear in print, refused. At Halley's insistence, Newton finally began writing and, with typical thoroughness, worked for 18 months revising and rewriting the short paper until it grew into three volumes. The Royal Society, having exhausted available funds on an extravagant edition of De Historia Piscium, or The History of Fishes, could not pay for the publication and so it was at Edmund Halley's expense that Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was finally published.
The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, or The Principia as it came to be commonly known, begins with the solid foundation on which the three books rest. Newton begins by defining the concepts of mass, motion (momentum), and three types of forces: inertial, impressed and centripetal. He also gives his definitions of absolute time, space, and motion, offering evidence for the existence of absolute space and motion in his famous "bucket experiment". These absolute concepts provoked great criticism from philosophers Leibnitz, Berkeley, and others, including Ernst Mach centuries later. The three Laws of Motion are proposed, with consequences derived from them. The remainder of The Principia continues in rigorously logical Euclidean fashion in the form of propositions, lemmas, corollaries and scholia. Book One, Of The Motion of Bodies, applies the laws of motion to the behaviour of bodies in various orbits. Book Two continues with the motion of resisted bodies in fluids, and with the behaviour of fluids themselves. In the Third Book, The System of the World, Newton applies the Law of Universal Gravitation to the motion of planets, moons and comets within the Solar System. He explains a diversity of phenomena from this unifying concept, including the behaviour of Earth's tides, the precession of the equinoxes, and the irregularities in the moon's orbit.
The Principia brought Newton fame, publicity, and financial security. It established him, at the age of 45, as one of the greatest scientists in history.

The basic idea for the moons of Jupiter, the moons of Saturn, the main planets, and the Earth’s moon, all obey Kepler’s 2nd and 3rd law. Newton deduced that Kepler’s 2nd and 3rd laws together require a central, inverse-square force.

The nature of the forces necessary to produce these phenomena.

Centripetal force is a force that tends towards the center of a circle, and centrifugal tends away from the center. It’s important to note that oftentimes, we get the two terms mixed up, and many people treat them as interchangeble.
The force necessary to divert the planet from its natural straight-line motion and keep it in its orbit ahs to point at each instant from the planet to the center of force located at the sun.
There were no proofs in “Pendulum Clocks” but they were published later in “De vi centrifuga” or “On centrifugal force”
Newton independently discovered this relation for centripetal force.

Many many equations.

Newtons proposition for the source or nature of the inverse-square central force.
He then just used his equation for the speed of the moon about the earth, and some known measurements to prove that it is solely the gravity of the earth that keeps the moon in orbit.

No one could figure out what G was until Henry Cavendish discovered it in the late 18th century.
Newton stated this law of gravitation, but he did not attempt to explain, or prove it.

Newton took a while to work on the idea of the gravitational forces between spherical masses. It turns out that he had developed the calculus to calculate this somewhere between 1665-1670, however he didn’t even attempt to use it until about the 1680’s. Now, using simple calculus, or even some advanced geometry, its pretty easy.

Newton never really adressed these two types of masses by name, but it is clear that he understood them. Inertial mass is the resistance of a given body to acceleration when a given force is applied to it… F=ma the m is inertial mass. Gravitational mass determines the magnitude of the gravitational attraction between the body and any other body.
Experiments have found that, since newton, inertial mass and gravitational mass are pretty much equal.
Newton soon discovered that if the two masses were not equal, pendulums made of different materials would have different periods, even if they had the same length. This would have violated Galileo’s discoveries, and was thus untrue.
He also found that Kepler’s 3rd law of planetary motion would be untrue if they were different. The reason for the exact equality will be discussed by Einstein with his general theory of relativity.


Newton’s law of universal gravitation

 

[darkbeaver]

twit

We accept your confession. That'll be three hundred hail marys and you must cease unilatateral carnal emissions.:smile:

 

[darkbeaver]

Cassiopeia A double layer explosion. Image in twelve-times ionized silicon light.
Credit: NASA/CXC/GSFC/U.Hwang et al
The Comeback of Cas A
Jan 23, 2009

Phenomena and their explanations are moving targets. What’s considered to be a phenomenon changes over time and requires a new explanation. If an explanation lasts long enough to enable us to do something with it, it’s a good explanation. Often the explanation will contain the seeds of its own overthrow: it will enable us to make new instruments and observations that contradict the explanation and reveal the phenomenon to be something other than what we considered it to be. The nature of considering—the ways that nerve activation evolve in our bodies—ensures that there will always be other possibilities for categorizing phenomena and explaining them.

An illustration is Cassiopeia A (Cas A) in the image above. Before modern instruments, astronomers found a few objects like Cas A: a ring of light around a central star. Since astronomical imagination was limited to mechanical explosions, the objects obviously were exploded stars. Few people doubted the accepted explanation that the ring of light was caused by limb brightening of a sphere of hot gaseous debris thrown off by the explosion.

The puzzle to be solved was imagining a mechanism that could produce the astronomical amouThe Comeback of Cas A

 

[darkbeaver]

Ice jets from Saturn’s small moon Enceladus explode from the surface in cometlike fashion,
to feed material into Saturn’s E ring.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
[Click on image to enlarge]
Space - The Latest, Greatest Surprises (Part 1)

The graphic above illustrates the magnetic field observed by Cassini,
as well as the "deflection" of the cloud being vented from the south pole of Enceladus.
Credit: NASA/JPL
[Click on image to enlarge]

 

[#juan]

This is the turkey you want to call a scientist???

Henry H. Bauer
The Velikovsky Affair began in 1950. In April of that year, Worlds in Collision by
Immanuel Velikovsky was published by Macmillan, a firm with a high reputation for both its
textbooks and its trade books. Worlds in Collision was advertised lavishly and sensationally
and it quickly became a best-seller. Most reviews in newspapers and popular magazines
followed the lead given by the advertisements: the book was highly original, a tour de force in
history and science, a challenge to conventional ideas, a work in the tradition of Galileo,
Newton, Darwin, and Einstein.
But among the academic community—in particular among scientists—the reaction was
very different. Velikovsky was called ignorant and incompetent in science and in historical
scholarship: his method was tendentious, his data biased, his conclusions impossible. And
there followed strong actions congruent with those words of outrage: professors threatened that
they would boycott Macmillan textbooks as long as the publisher sponsored pseudo-science in
the form of Worlds in Collision—and Macmillan responded by transferring to a rival publisher,
Doubleday, the rights to that best-selling book. James Putnam, who had been Velikovsky’s
editor at Macmillan, was discharged. Gordon Atwater, of the Hayden Planetarium and
American Museum of Natural History, had planned a show based on the scenario of Worlds in
Collision; first he was told not to proceed with the show, and then he was dismissed from his
position.
What sort of book could produce such violent reactions? How could it happen that so
much high praise for scholarship and originality was expressed for a work that others described
as incompetent or worse? What could lead scientists to seek the suppression of a book, to
boycott a publisher of respected textbooks, to be implicated in the firing of an editor and of a
planetarium director?
Worlds in Collision was an unlikely volume to become popularly read. It has nests of
footnotes at the bottom of most of its 400 pages; its language is rather florid, allusions to the
ancient classics abound, and it goes into minute detail on many points, about astronomy and
history in particular. The book begins with a survey of contemporary knowledge about the
Solar System and the history of the Earth. Then follows a recounting and analysis of ancient
history and legend about notable cataclysmic events: the fall of stones from the heavens,
associated with the standing-still of the Sun at Joshua’s command and, on the other side of the

Earth, an abnormally long night; the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt and such associated
events as the parting of the Red Sea and the fall of manna from the heavens; and so forth.
Stories about the gods—Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and others—are taken as referring to
movements of the planets bearing those names. The upshot is this: some thousands of years
ago, Jupiter emitted a cometary body which came close to Earth several times around 1500
B.C.—close enough to cause the mentioned disasters of fire, flood, hurricane, mountainous
upheavals, tidal waves, and more; the length of the year was permanently altered. Then the
comet swung by Mars and displaced it from its orbit (which was at that time inside the orbit of
the Earth); several times around 700 B.C. there were close encounters between Mars and Earth,
accompanied by more devastation, The guilty comet, meanwhile, had settled into orbit around
the Sun: it is now the planet we call Venus.

An absolute crock!

 

[#juan]

Sagan was a TV celebrity Juan his books are complete rubbish, his contribution to science was smearing Velikovsky. I just reread comet, it's total crap.

Carl Sagan, Explorer, Scientist, Author, 1934-1996

Carl Sagan played a leading role in the United States space program since its inception. He was a consultant and advisor to NASA since the 1950s, briefed the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon, and was an experimenter on the Mariner, Viking, Voyager and Galileo expeditions to the planets. He helped solve the mysteries of the high temperature of Venus, the seasonal changes on Mars and the reddish haze of Titan.

For his work, Sagan received the NASA Medals for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and (twice) the Distinguished Public Service, as well as the NASA Apollo Achievement Award. Asteroid 2709 Sagan is named after him. He was also given the John F. Kennedy Astronautics Award of the American Astronautical Society, the Explorers Club 75th Anniversary Award, the Konstantin Tsiolokovsky Medal of the Soviet Cosmonautics Federation and the Masursky Award of the American Astronomical Society. The citation for the Masursky Award read:

. . . for his extraordinary contributions in the development of planetary science. . . As a scientist trained in both astronomy and biology, Sagan made seminal contributions to the study of planetary atmospheres, planetary surfaces, the history of Earth, and exobiology. Many of the most productive planetary scientists working today are his former students and associates.

He was the 1994 recipient of the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences. The citation for this honor read:

. . . Carl Sagan has been enormously successful in communicating the wonder and importance of science. His ability to capture the imagination of millions and to explain difficult concepts in understandable terms is a magnificent achievement.

Sagan was cofounder and President of The Planetary Society, a 100,000-member organization that is the largest space-interest group in the world; and Distinguished Visiting Scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Sagan served as Chairman of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, as President of the Planetology Section of the American Geophysical Union, and as Chairman of the Astronomy Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. For 12 years he was Editor in Chief of Icarus, the leading professional journal devoted to planetary research.

A Pulitzer Prize winner (twice), Sagan was the author of many best sellers, including Cosmos, which became the best-selling science book ever published in the English language. The accompanying Emmy and Peabody award-winning television series has been seen by 500 million people in 60 countries. He received 20 honorary degrees from both Canadian and U.S. colleges and universities for his contributions to science, literature, education and the preservation of the environment. At Cornell University, he served as the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies.

Sagan's last book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, was released by Random House in March 1996. At the time of his death, he was serving as coproducer and cowriter of the Warner Brothers movie, Contact, based on his novel and scheduled for a 1997 release.

Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, astrochemist, author, and highly successful popularizer of astronomy, astrophysics and other natural sciences. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

He is world-famous for writing popular science books and for co-writing and presenting the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which has been seen by more than 600 million people in over 60 countries, making it the most widely watched PBS program in history.[2] A book to accompany the program was also published. He also wrote the novel Contact, the basis for the 1997 Robert Zemeckis film of the same name starring Jodie Foster. During his lifetime, Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and popular articles and was author, co-author, or editor of more than 20 books. In his works, he frequently advocated skeptical inquiry, secular humanism, and the scientific method.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

There's plenty of solid evidence against Velikovsky's claims. For instance:

1. Venus in one of its close approaches supposedly left enough debris in the atmosphere to cause 40 years of darkness. There should be very clear signs of that in ice cores and the record of sedimentation. There aren't, there's no sign of such a layer anywhere in the world at the appropriate time.

2. The orbits of Venus, Earth, and Mars are all nearly circular and all nearly in the same plane, and there are tidal resonances between Earth and the Moon, and Mars and its two little moons. That means there cannot have been recent orbital disturbances on the scale Velikovsky imagines.

3. Velikovsky claims a global catastrophe killed off all the trees 3500 years ago. There are living trees, bristlecone pines, older than that. When confronted with the fact, according to Leroy Ellenberger, Velikovsky's response was "So? They survived." Typical of what Ellenberger described as Velikovsky's "cavalier attitude toward disconfirming evidence."

4. Velikovsky predicted carbohydrates will be found in Venus' atmosphere. They're not there. What's there is a lot of sulphuric acid, and if Venus had ever been close enough to Earth for their atmospheres to mix, which is required for the fall of manna while the Israelites were wandering in the desert, the most likely result would have been the sterilization of Earth's biosphere and the moon being flung off into space.

5. Ancient lunar calendars and astronomical observations clearly indicate the Moon's orbit hasn't changed significantly for at least 6000 years.

6. Venus is far too big to ever have had a visible tail like a comet.

7. The continuity of plants and animals on low-lying Pacific islands means they were not overwhelmed by a global tidal wave 3500 years ago when the sun supposedly stood still for Joshua. J.B.S. Haldane, based on data from ocean bottom sediment cores and varves in Sweden, concluded that there's absolutely no possibility of global floods in the last 10,000 years.

There's lots more, but it won't make any difference to Velikovskians. They have, as Ellenberger noted, "...no respect for the absolute veto power of negative evidence because they have a quasi-religious belief/faith that the events really happened..."

 

[#juan]

Great post as usual Dexter.

I've wondered quite a few times why a person like Velikovsky would publish something ridiculous like "Worlds in Collision" when his own academic standing was tenuous at best. It seems that he was trying to fit his brand of cosmological history with those catastophic events from the Old Testament; the parting of the Red Sea etc. What is surprising is that he survived it all and was still getting people to attend his talks up to the time of his death.

 

[darkbeaver]

Gentlemen why do you continue with this vituperation of the long dead Mr Professor Velikovsky? Velikovsky is the least of your unsurmountable problems in defence of a thing so ludicrus as a noncatastrophic near past, the evidence is conclusive.
A Record of Planetary Catastrophe
Jul 07, 2006
A Record of Planetary Catastrophe
Antarctic fossil Questions

Apr 04, 2005
Antarctic Fossil Questions
The Worzel Deep Sea Ash

Jan 28, 2008
The Worzel Deep Sea Ash​

Sediment samples indicate that there is a layer of nickel-rich ash covering the bottom of all the world’s oceans. Could cosmic plasma discharges be responsible?

Feb 20, 2008
VENUS' TAIL OF THE UNEXPECTED
Venus' Tail of the Unexpected​

Ancient peoples report that the planet Venus once had visible "ropes" stretching out to the Earth. Could a plasma glow discharge have been the cause?​

The "induced magnetotail" that points away from Venus in the direction of the earth is a teardrop-shaped plasma structure filled with “a lot of little stringy things” that was first detected by NASA’s Pioneer Venus Orbiter in the late 1970s. In 1997, Europe’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) Satellite showed that the tail stretched some 45,000,000 kilometres into space, more than 600 times as far as anyone had realized and almost far enough to “tickle” the earth when the two planets are in line with the sun.​

“In this sense”, scientists write, “Venus can be likened to a comet, which has an induced magnetotail of similar origin.”​

Intriguingly, as has been abun
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[#juan]

DB

I will believe in all manner of catastrophe happening on Earth as long as you don't try to make me swallow that these catastrophes were caused by Venus, newly spat out of Jupiter, and wondering between Earth and Mars before settling into an orbit where it now resides.

Btw, Venus is far too massive to allow a tail. If it was possible for solar wind to blow material off Venus, why is it not doing it right now? Which ancient people reported this "tail"?

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Gentlemen why do you continue with this vituperation of the long dead Mr Professor Velikovsky?

If you'd stop, we probably would too. It's because he's wrong, and so are you, and you keep dogmatically claiming otherwise based on very lame evidence, denying or ignoring disconfirming evidence, or using falsified and/or superceded evidence, while making the laughable claim to be a cutting edge scientist yourself. The Worzel ash layer, for instance, is now known to be of volcanic origin, it's not global in extent, and is much older than any of Velikovsky's catastrophes.

 

[darkbeaver]

If you'd stop, we probably would too. It's because he's wrong, and so are you, and you keep dogmatically claiming otherwise based on very lame evidence, denying or ignoring disconfirming evidence, or using falsified and/or superceded evidence, while making the laughable claim to be a cutting edge scientist yourself. The Worzel ash layer, for instance, is now known to be of volcanic origin, it's not global in extent, and is much older than any of Velikovsky's catastrophes.

Fine sir, a link to aquaint myself with your evidence would be in order, were we in fact in ordered debate of some recognizable sort. While I stand accused of very lame evidence you sir present yourself bereft of evidence of any sort, lame or otherwise. I trust you'll therefore understand without reservation or hesitation why I cannot in any honesty accept your position based on your previously good word in other matters. Your severage package is in the mail, I'll have maintenance clean off your bench.:smile:

 

[darkbeaver]

DB

I will believe in all manner of catastrophe happening on Earth as long as you don't try to make me swallow that these catastrophes were caused by Venus, newly spat out of Jupiter, and wondering between Earth and Mars before settling into an orbit where it now resides.

Btw, Venus is far too massive to allow a tail. If it was possible for solar wind to blow material off Venus, why is it not doing it right now? Which ancient people reported this "tail"?

Why the begging? One'd think I was asking you to swallow a red hot anvil? The curent induced field or the field induced current changes a little to compensate for incomming currect and the photosphere of Venus lengthens and brushes the earth like a big frayed extension cord ZZZZZZZZZZZ lots of flames and thunder carving new features strangely recorded in story, song and rock circumglobaly.
So you have the gall to heap monstrous disrespect on all your primate ancestors, the fact that you consider them so completely ahead of thier time in production and mastery of blanket planetary marketing of the finest science fiction known to the artistic world, even now the entertainment economy depends to a huge extent on long exercised themes of celestial nature.and sea-level change.


Signs of the Times News for Sat, 24 Jan 2009
Though I wasn't able to attend, the reports of the event made the news. Ice Age Ends Smashingly: Did a comet blow up over eastern Canada?

Evidence unearthed at more than two dozen sites across North America suggests that an extraterrestrial object exploded in Earth's atmosphere above Canada about 12,900 years ago, just as the climate was warming at the end of the last ice age. The explosion sparked immense wildfires, devastated North America's ecosystems and prehistoric cultures, and triggered a millennium-long cold spell, scientists say.​

Well, the first thing you notice is that it wasn't an asteroid, but a comet. Likewise the Tunguska event in 1908 was a comet, not an asteroid. Norse mythologies talk about "Fenris-wolf" who "advances with wide-open mouth," the "upper jaw" reaching to heaven and the "lower jaw" to earth.