Bad Astronomy. Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing 'Hoax'

many criticisms of Velikovsky’s interpretations of these works, and it’s quite possible that his research is historically inaccurate. To be honest, I have no expertise in this, and so I’ll refrain from judging his ideas on their historical merit. However, I’ll be happy to discuss them in an astronomical context.

Like most areas of pseudoscience such as astrology and creationism, it’s possible to find fatal flaws in the theories without resorting to a detailed and painful analysis of every fact and figure. As a matter of fact, sometimes it pays not to nitpick; when you do, pseudoscience supporters will simply throw more facts and figures at you, hoping either to dazzle you with their database of knowledge or to confuse you beyond hope of reaching any rational conclusion. So, instead of going over his writings with a fine-toothed comb, it’s a better idea to look at more general concepts — large, broad areas that contradict the basic premise. These are usually easier to explain and understand, anyway. If I mention a few details it’s because I think they’re important, as well as fun and interesting.

Velikovsky’s main idea of Venus as tooling around the solar system and creating havoc is based on many ancient writings. Perhaps the most important biblical passage is in Joshua 10:12-13. During a massive battle with the Canaanites, Joshua knew he could win if only he had a little more time, but the day was drawing to a close. Getting desperate, he asked God to make the Sun stop its daily motion around the Earth, giving him the extra time he needed. The biblical passage reads, “… and the Sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and the Moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemy.” Then, almost exactly 24 hours later — after the battle was over — God restarted the heavens, setting the Sun and Moon in motion once more.

Today, we would interpret that — if we are particularly literal minded — to mean that the Earth’s rotation stopped, so that it only appeared that the Sun and Moon were motionless in the sky. Somehow, a day later, it started its rotation again.

Velikovsky, quite literal-minded indeed, was researching this event and discovered reports of a meteor storm that supposedly happened just before the Earth’s motion stopped. To him, the meteors indicated an astronomical cause for the biblical passage. This idea dovetailed neatly with other legends he found, such as those in ancient Greece. The goddess Minerva, associated at the time with the planet Venus, was born fully grown from the head of Zeus (associated with the planet Jupiter). Other cultures had vaguely similar claims of ties between Jupiter and Venus. Velikovsky suspected that these legends were actually based in fact. From there, he shaped his idea that the planet Venus was indeed literally ejected from the planet Jupiter, and subsequently encountered the Earth on multiple occasions.

It was the first such encounter with Venus that stopped the Earth’s rotation. Somehow — Velikovsky is never really clear on this, but instead invokes vague claims of a previously unknown electromagnetic process — Venus was able to slow and stop the Earth’s spin during an exceptionally close pass. Venus then moved off, but a day later came back for a second pass that started the Earth’s rotation again. Venus itself was sent off in a long, elliptical orbit, only to pass by the Earth again some 52 years later. Over time, Venus settled down into its present orbit as the second planet from the Sun.

There are so many flaws with this idea that it’s difficult to know where to start. For example, Velikovsky points to many passages in ancient texts that describe a great comet in the sky, the passing of which precedes many of these catastrophes. How to reconcile this with the planet Venus? Well, he says, Venus was ejected from Jupiter as a comet. It didn’t become a planet proper until it found its way into a stable orbit around the Sun.

First, ejecting something with the mass of Venus would be very difficult to say the least. Velikovsky suggests that Venus fissioned off, flung outwards by Jupiter’s rapid rotation in the same way that a dog shakes its body to spray off water after a bath. In reality, this won’t work.

There are many lines of evidence showing the solar system to be billions of years old. Why would Jupiter wait until a few thousand years ago — a tiny, tiny fraction of its lifetime — to suddenly eject a planet-sized mass? The only way to shrug off this huge coincidence is to say that this is not a rare event, and that Jupiter has done it many times before. But where are these planets? If you assume all the planets formed this way, then you are left with the problem of how Jupiter formed. Since Jupiter would slow its own rotation every time this happened, it would have had to start with an impossibly high rotation rate.

Second, Venus and Jupiter have entirely different compositions. Jupiter is mostly hydrogen, the lightest element. It probably has denser elements in its core, but Venus should show at least some similarities to Jupiter. However, they’re about as different as two planets can be. The chemical composition of Venus is very much like that of the Earth, so it seems unlikely that similar planets would have formed in such vastly different ways.

Third, Venus is a fair-sized planet. In fact, it has almost exactly the same mass and diameter as the Earth. Jupiter is orbited by a retinue of moons, four of which are so big that they would be planets in their own right if they didn’t orbit their mighty host. These moons orbit Jupiter in nice, almost perfectly circular orbits, which is what one would expect after millions or billions of years of gravitational interaction with Jupiter and each other. (See chapter 7, “The Gravity of the Situation,” for more about tidal evolution.)

Now imagine Venus plowing outward through this system. The orneriest bull in the most delicate of china shops would be nothing compared to the devastation wrought on the jovian system. The moons would get scattered, their orderly orbits perturbed by the rampaging planet on its way out bent into long ellipses. Some may even have been ejected from Jupiter completely to wander space as Venus reportedly did; yet there is no mention of these rogue moons in ancient texts.

We see no evidence of this at all in the system of moons around Jupiter. By all observations, the moons have been doing what they do now for the past billion or two years at least. If there have been any disturbances, they certainly have not occurred in the past few millennia.

Velikovsky spends quite some time in Worlds in Collision trying to show that Venus was ejected by Jupiter. He is wrong; such an event simply could not happen. It can be shown mathematically that the amount of energy needed to eject Venus would have literally vaporized the planet! In other words, whatever type of event Velikovsky envisioned to shoot Venus out of Jupiter actually would have turned Venus into a very hot, incandescent gas, exploding outwards like, well, an explosion. It certainly would not have formed a solid body able to roam the solar system. This seriously weakens his argument about Venus wandering the solar system, unless you believe in truly immense forces having incredibly benign effects. It would be like dropping an anvil on an egg and winding up with two perfectly split egg shells, one with the white inside and the other with the yolk. When forces are that huge, they rarely clean up after themselves so neatly. In reality, the egg would be a goopy mess, just as Venus would be by whatever forces Velikovsky was imagining.

Still, let’s grant that some mysterious unknown force set Venus in motion. So, ignoring the genesis of Venus, is it still possible that it somehow passed so close to the Earth that it caused widespread disaster here?

In a word: no.

From his readings Velikovsky concludes that Venus passed close enough to the Earth to stop its rotation, moved off, then came back a few hours later and started the Earth moving again. However, he is very vague about the exact mechanism for this. He theorizes that perhaps the Earth didn’t really slow and stop, but instead it flipped over on its axis, making the north pole become the south pole and vice versa.

Indeed, he spends dozens of pages giving evidence that the Earth didn’t always spin with the north pole in the position it is now. He starts a chapter about this as follows: “Our planet rotates from west to east. Has it always done so?” He quotes ancient texts as saying that the Earth has flipped not just once, but many times.

His basis for this is pretty shaky. One passage he quotes talks about two drawings of constellations found in an Egyptian tomb. In one drawing, the constellations are represented correctly, and in the other they are reversed east-to-west, as if the Earth were spinning the wrong way. How else to account for this but to assume the Earth indeed was spinning east to west?

Actually, there are two ways. One is that the Earth is a big ball. To someone standing in the southern hemisphere, the constellations will look upside down compared to the view of someone standing in the northern hemisphere. The curvature of the Earth does this, making one person look like he is “standing on his head” relative to another. That would explain the upside-down constellations pretty well; perhaps a traveler was describing what he saw Down Under.

There is another explanation as well. Many ancients thought stars were holes in a great crystal sphere, letting the light of heaven shine through. The gods lived on the other side and therefore saw the constellations