Immanuel Velikovsky, scientist or twit?

[Dexter Sinister]

In 1960-61, V. A. Bailey calculated that to account for the data obtained in space probes (Pioneer V) the sun must possess a net negative charge with the potential of the order of 1019 volts

I presume, for consistency with other claims in that post, that the number is 10 to the 19th power, not 1019. That busts the electric sun theory; if the sun had a negative potential that big, it could not be powered by a current of electrons, they'd all be going the other way and there'd be no protons in the solar wind. If a current of electrons was energetic enough to punch through a negative potential that big and get to the sun, there'd be a tremendous flux of x-rays produced. There isn't.

Let's try this approach: you believe Velikovsky was right, and that the electric cosmos theory, as promoted by the thunderbolts and holoscience sites you keep linking to, is right. What evidence would you accept as proving you wrong, what could falsify those claims in your view?

 

[L Gilbert]

Bailey and Velikovsky were Conservatives.

 

[darkbeaver]

I presume, for consistency with other claims in that post, that the number is 10 to the 19th power, not 1019. That busts the electric sun theory; if the sun had a negative potential that big, it could not be powered by a current of electrons, they'd all be going the other way and there'd be no protons in the solar wind. If a current of electrons was energetic enough to punch through a negative potential that big and get to the sun, there'd be a tremendous flux of x-rays produced. There isn't.

Let's try this approach: you believe Velikovsky was right, and that the electric cosmos theory, as promoted by the thunderbolts and holoscience sites you keep linking to, is right. What evidence would you accept as proving you wrong, what could falsify those claims in your view?

Show me a piece of a black hole or a bottle filled with dark matter.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Oh c'mon Beave, try to be sensible. You know perfectly well those things aren't accessible to me but there's lots of indirect evidence that points to their possible existence. Besides, they wouldn't disprove Velikovsky's claims anyway, there's nothing in his stuff for which they're alternative explanations.

 

[darkbeaver]

Oh c'mon Beave, try to be sensible. You know perfectly well those things aren't accessible to me but there's lots of indirect evidence that points to their possible existence. Besides, they wouldn't disprove Velikovsky's claims anyway, there's nothing in his stuff for which they're alternative explanations.

Sensible? That right there is the crux of the entire Velikovsky story. Here's another perspective I hope you will consider.

THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR
SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE​

Alfred de Grazia
January 1978
​

INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION

We dedicate this book to people who are concerned about the ways in which scientists behave and how science develops. It deals especially with the freedoms that scientists grant or withhold from one another. The book is also for people who are interested in new theories of cosmogony - the causes of the skies, the earth, and humankind as we see them. It is, finally, a book for people who are fascinated by human conflict, in this case a struggle among some of the most educated, elevated, and civilized characters of our times.


These lines are being written a few weeks after the launching of a carefully prepared book attacking the growing position of Immanuel Velikovsky in intellectual circles [1]. The attack was followed promptly by a withering counter-attack in a special issue of the journal, Kronos [2]. The events reflect a general scene which, since the first appearance of this volume, has been perhaps more congenial to the temperament of war correspondents than of cloistered scholars.
The philosophical psychologist, William James, who once proposed sport as a substitute for warfare, might as well have proposed science and scholarship for the same function. Scientific battles also have their armies, rules, tactics, unexpected turns, passions bridled and unbridled, defeats, retreats, and casualty lists. All of the motives that go into warfare are exercised. In the present controversy, the minds of the combatants must also carry into the fray images of a distant past when the world was ruined by immense disasters, whether or not they deny the images.
Unlike sport, the outcomes of scientific battles are as important, if not more so, than the results of outright warfare. At stake in the controversy over Velikovsky's ideas is not only the system used by science to change itself - which is largely the subject of this book - but also the substantive model of change to be employed by future science - whether is shall be comprehended mainly as revolutionary and catastrophic or as evolutionary and uniform.
THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR: INTRODUCTION TO THE 2ND EDITION

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Yes, I know about the Velikovsky Affair, I've read a lot about it. Not one of science's prouder moments, I grant you, but it's really a political story and has very little to do with whether Velikovsky was right or not in a scientific sense. My question still stands.

 

[darkbeaver]

Yes, I know about the Velikovsky Affair, I've read a lot about it. Not one of science's prouder moments, I grant you, but it's really a political story and has very little to do with whether Velikovsky was right or not in a scientific sense. My question still stands.

The moment eh. It was and is a matter of social and political power and the maintenance of wealth and privilage. I cannot answer your question there is not any disproof for that which is fact.
Immanuel Velikovsky, scientist or twit? I am acctually hard pressed to find an individual who's work has contributed so much to science. That is an irrefutable fact. Perhaps no one in the last century generated so much good research aimed at refutation of his work, most of it in vain vindictive failure of that goal. The scientismists conspiracy continues.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

I cannot answer your question there is not any disproof for that which is fact.

V's speculations are a long way from being established as facts. If he was right, there should be signs that aren't present, and similarly there shouldn't be certain things that *are* present. There should, for instance, be the clear signature of the 40 years of darkness caused by "comet Venus" depositing so much debris here, in ice cores, the sedimentary record, and tree rings. It's not present, all three show evidence consistent with a much more uniformitarian history over the relevant time periods. There should be signs of globe-girdling tidal waves. There aren't. There should be signs that the oceans once boiled. There aren't. On the other side, there are delicate limestone structures in caves formed by slowly percolating water that long predate V's catastrophes that shouldn't exist if he was right. The moon should not be in a nearly circular, tidally locked orbit with the earth, it would most likely have been flung away into space, or at least be in a strongly eccentric orbit.

In effect you're claiming that no evidence can disprove Velikovsky. That really means the evidence in his favour doesn't matter either, he's invulnerable to any kind of evidence. That's a common style of thought, but it's not science.

 

[L Gilbert]

I still say he was a scientist. Not a very good scientist, but a scientist nonetheless. Sort of like Michael Mann.

 

[#juan]

The more you read about Velikovsky, the weirder it gets.
Some of Velikovsky's specific postulated catastrophes included:

• A tentative suggestion that Earth had once been a satellite of a "proto-Saturn" body, before its current solar orbit.
• That the Deluge (Noah's Flood) had been caused by proto-Saturn entering a nova state, and ejecting much of its mass into space.
• A suggestion that the planet Mercury was involved in the Tower of Babel catastrophe.
• Jupiter had been the culprit for the catastrophe which saw the destruction of the "Cities of the Plain" (Sodom and Gomorrah)
• Periodic close contacts with a cometary Venus (which had been ejected from Jupiter) had caused the Exodus events (c.1500 BCE) and Joshua's subsequent "sun standing still" incident.
• Periodic close contacts with Mars had caused havoc in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE.

Wapedia - Wiki: Immanuel Velikovsky

 

[Dexter Sinister]

I still say he was a scientist. Not a very good scientist, but a scientist nonetheless. Sort of like Michael Mann.

He originally trained as a psychoanalyst, which isn't science either, and dragged in some now largely discredited Freudian notions of repressed memory to explain the absence of certain records about his claimed catastrophes. I still say he was twit. Very ingenious, very intelligent, very inventive, and an entertaining writer and speaker, but still a twit.

But the categories of scientist and twit aren't mutually exclusive... :smile:

 

[darkbeaver]

" Torquemada was evil; Velikovsky's academic enemies, merely foolish." -- Stephen Jay Gould, biologist, 1977

"What we call mass would seem to be nothing but an appearance, and all inertia to be of electromagnetic origin." --Henri Poincaré, physicist, 1908

[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif][SIZE=+7]C[/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif][SIZE=+3]OSMOS[/SIZE][/FONT] [FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif][SIZE=+7]W[/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif][SIZE=+3]ITHOUT[/SIZE][/FONT] [FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif][SIZE=+7]G[/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif][SIZE=+3]RAVITATION[/SIZE][/FONT]

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[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]ATTRACTION, REPULSION AND ELECTROMAGNETIC CIRCUMDUCTION IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM[/FONT]

[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]
Synopsis[/FONT]

[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]BY[/FONT]​

[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif][SIZE=+2]IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY[/SIZE][/FONT]​

[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]1946[/FONT]​

Cosmos Without Gravitation

The conventional response is to explain Venus's temperature as the result of a "runaway greenhouse effect." This falls down for a number of reasons:

• With surface pressure 90 times and mass 75 times Earth's, the atmosphere of Venus has thermal properties comparable to an ocean 3,000 feet deep. Penetration of solar energy is nowhere near sufficient to produce appreciable heating to any depth. Further, the high albedo (reflectance), means that only a minor portion of incident energy gets past the cloud tops to begin with. Heating at the base of the atmosphere due to solar input alone would be around 6 deg C above freezing.
• Carbon dioxide, the major constituent of the atmosphere, is incapable of producing the postulated runaway on its own. It would require an additional component to "close" the critical 25 % transparency window that permits reradiation back into space at thermal wavelengths. Water vapor, the primary candidate, is conspicuously absent. Methane is a possibility, but puts proponents in the position of confirming another of Velikovsky's predictions (an atmosphere would be rich in hydrocarbon gases derived from the atmosphere of Jupiter
• ) that was ridiculed when first put forward. Even so, the problem remains that solar penetration is inadequate for any runaway to happen.
• Probably the most damning for the greenhouse theory is the data from all of the US and Russian probes showing that the thermal gradient of the atmosphere is from base to cloud tops, i.e. the heat source is at the bottom, not outside. In short, the claims that have been made publicly notwithstanding, the planet is not in thermal equilibrium. According to the probe data, the emitted surface infrared flux is 40 times more than enters as sunlight. About 2 percent of the heat at the surface can be attributed to solar input. Overall, Venus emits 15 percent more energy than it receives from the sun, implying a heat output 10,000 times greater than Earth's. Although Venus rotates 243 times more slowly than Earth (58-day dark period), nightside temperatures are slightly higher than on the day side--contradicting the notion that the sun is the heat source. Rigorous mathematical modeling by the thermodynamicist George R. Talbott showed that given an incandescent state 3,500 years ago as the recent-origin theory proposes, the cooling curve over that period yields a temperature today exactly as observed.
• A solar heating model predicts large-scale atmospheric circulation in a north-south direction, transporting heat from the equator to the poles, which should be highly pronounced in view of the planet's slow rotation. Probe data show no such circulation. On the contrary, the entire atmosphere is in a state of super east-west rotation 100 times faster than the surface speed (5 m.p.h equatorial) at all latitudes. (Note. This enormous super-rotation of the atmosphere is consistent with the idea of evolution from a giant comet-like body, whose tail wrapped around the planet gravitationally as Venus slowed into its present orbit, and is still dissipating angular momentum.)

Bulletin Board

 

[#juan]

The Greenhouse Effect
Venus reflects two thirds of the solar energy that falls on it and is black in the infrared so it is a good radiator when T<1000K. So the cloud tops at least should be quite cold. They are. Of the energy that penetrates into the cloud layer a significant amount is absorbed, heating the clouds, and only a few percent of the incident energy reaches the ground. So the surface is dimly lit and since red light penetrates the clouds easiest the light is rather red. This is the reason for the color in the pictures sent back via the Venera landers. With white light the surface would be shades of grey. The feeble light warms the surface which radiates back into the atmosphere where it is promptly absorbed and returned. The thick CO2 atmosphere is opaque to infrared radiation and acts like a thick blanket. Since the heat transfer is very slow the temperature gradient must be very steep so that in equilibrium the surface must be very hot. It is. "Blanket effect" would be a better term than "greenhouse" but we use the latter term because everyone knows what we mean. Of course a greenhouse works by inhibiting convection.

 

[darkbeaver]

http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=9aqt6cz5&pf=YES

The extraordinary high temperature of Venus was perhaps one of Velikovsky's most outrageous and successful predictions. In his "Challenge to Conventional Views in Science" delivered at the symposium, "Velikovsky's Challenge to Science," held in San Francisco on February 25, 1974, under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Velikovsky said, "I may have even caused retardation in the development of science by making some opponents cling to their unacceptable views only because such views may contradict Velikovsky -- like sticking to the completely unsupportable hypothesis of greenhouse effect as the cause of Venus' heat, even in violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics."

The second law of thermodynamics is a general principle, which places constraints upon the direction of heat transfer. To maintain the high surface temperature of Venus there should be no net flow of heat through the atmosphere. However, when the Pioneer Venus probes looked at the amount of radiant energy passing through the atmosphere, each one found more energy being radiated up from the lower atmosphere than enters it as sunlight. And, if this were not enough, the night probe site was shown to be about 2K warmer than it was at the day probe site. The Russian probes, Vega 1 and 2, also "recorded a pronounced upward radiation flux." These findings simply show that Venus' surface is hot and still cooling.

Velikovsky may have overstated his case (and mistakenly created a false historical context), based on ancient reports of Venus appearing as brilliantly incandescent as the Sun. That brilliance, like that of the Sun, may have had a predominantly electrical origin. Coal-dark comet nuclei are known to exhibit a star-like brilliance when discharging strongly. However, powerful electric currents flowing in the crust of a cometary Venus would generate heat near the surface very effectively.
………………………………………………………………………………………..

 

[Dexter Sinister]

more energy being radiated up from the lower atmosphere than enters it as sunlight.

An utterly meaningless statement in the absence of data on the power spectrum--i.e. how much energy at each frequency--of the radiation involved in both cases. Venus' atmosphere is opaque to infrared, so none of that's going to get down to the ground. What radiation does get to the ground is absorbed and partially re-radiated as infrared, which can't escape through the atmosphere to space, it gets reflected back down to the ground, and so forth. The people at holoscience always sound like they know what they're talking about, but to someone who knows some real physics, they don't. Even Don Scott, a Ph.D. in electrical engineering you're fond of quoting, often forgets his basic physics. A real astrophysicist, W.T. Bridgman, has effectively ripped Scott's The Electric Sky to pieces on his web site using only undergrad-level physics. I've given you that link before, but you obviously either don't read or don't understand such things.

... powerful electric currents flowing in the crust of a cometary Venus would generate heat near the surface very effectively.

No doubt, but what was the source of those currents, and where are they now? Current doesn't flow in the absence of a voltage difference, except near absolute zero.

 

[darkbeaver]

"but you obviously either don't read or don't understand such things."

There is another option, however unlikely you consider it. The owners and officers of the Titanic held such unfounded confidence in thier calculated beliefs right up untill they froze in the North Atlantic.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

There is another option, however unlikely you consider it.

I consider it so unlikely as to be not worth thinking about. You have not answered any of the specific challenges anyone's issued to Velikovsky's claims or the electric universe theories, you have not responded to very detailed and specific criticisms of the consequences they must have that are not seen, you just keep citing your favourite woo woo sites and waving your hands a lot. You don't know what you're talking about, and don't even know enough basic physics to know that you don't know what you're talking about.

Try this: suppose in interstellar space there are two sheets of opposite charge a distance D meters apart with a potential difference of V volts between them. How long would it take for them to come together and neutralize each other, and what are the implications of this for the electric universe theory you're so fond of?

Elementary 2nd year electromagnetic theory Beave. Can you do it? Show your work.

 

[#juan]

A solar heating model predicts large-scale atmospheric circulation in a north-south direction, transporting heat from the equator to the poles, which should be highly pronounced in view of the planet's slow rotation. Probe data show no such circulation. On the contrary, the entire atmosphere is in a state of super east-west rotation 100 times faster than the surface speed (5 m.p.h equatorial) at all latitudes. (Note. This enormous super-rotation of the atmosphere is consistent with the idea of evolution from a giant comet-like body, whose tail wrapped around the planet gravitationally as Venus slowed into its present orbit, and is still dissipating angular momentum.)

But first we have to believe the cock and bull story about Venus popping out of Jupiter to become a comet and grow a tail. We have already decided that Venus was too massive to allow a tail so that fictional tail would not be providing angular momentum dissipation to make 500 mph winds on the planet.

You've previously said that Venus was cooling off........It is not! There is some temperature variation due to weather but the mean temperature has been fairly steady during the time this information has been recorded.

 

[darkbeaver]

I consider it so unlikely as to be not worth thinking about. You have not answered any of the specific challenges anyone's issued to Velikovsky's claims or the electric universe theories, you have not responded to very detailed and specific criticisms of the consequences they must have that are not seen, you just keep citing your favourite woo woo sites and waving your hands a lot. You don't know what you're talking about, and don't even know enough basic physics to know that you don't know what you're talking about.

Try this: suppose in interstellar space there are two sheets of opposite charge a distance D meters apart with a potential difference of V volts between them. How long would it take for them to come together and neutralize each other, and what are the implications of this for the electric universe theory you're so fond of?

Elementary 2nd year electromagnetic theory Beave. Can you do it? Show your work.

You sound somewhat like a priest I used to know. There are no sheets in space Dexter there are birkland currents which come together when they have accumulated mass the shorting produces matter, at all other times bodies in space have plasma sheaths which isolates the charged bodies from the charged region of space untill such time as the double layer is breached by an increase of incoming current, this breaching which powers the aroral discharges has been proven and photographed, space is not neutral, that has been made fact. You insist on mathmatical proof and refuse to entertain empherical evidence which literally covers every body in space. Plasma man, it all runs on plasma, even gravity.
You are a math addict Dexter, in no case, ever, does math precede observation or invention, it is handy in but it is not science. If you want a math fix, to get the monkey off your back, turn to the calculations surrounding Hawkins latest religious proposals surrounding black holes, that should keep you buzzed for a while. History obviously dosen't mean much to you Dex and that is very sad.

 

[darkbeaver]

But first we have to believe the cock and bull story about Venus popping out of Jupiter to become a comet and grow a tail. We have already decided that Venus was too massive to allow a tail so that fictional tail would not be providing angular momentum dissipation to make 500 mph winds on the planet.

You've previously said that Venus was cooling off........It is not! There is some temperature variation due to weather but the mean temperature has been fairly steady during the time this information has been recorded.

You still believe the original cock and bull story of millions of years of accreation, even in the face of very good math proving it to be exactly that and you have no trouble swallowing black hole fantasy. Venus is electrically heated it can cool or heat depending on the current available.