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

backward relative to us. Many star maps show this so-called “gods’ view” of the sky. In the main corridor of Grand Central Terminal in New York City, the stars are painted on the ceiling this way. Perhaps that Egyptian drawing was showing our view of the sky versus the gods’ view.

I find either of these explanations a bit more palatable than calling for the Earth to flip over.

And again, even if we do grant that the Earth flipped over, Velikovsky would have us believe that another pass of Venus 24 hours later flipped the Earth back the way it was, and spinning at the same rate. To put it very mildly, this is pretty unlikely.

There are still two more massive, basic, truly fatal flaws to Velikovsky’s Venus theory: one is that we still exist, and the other is that the Moon is still around.

Velikovsky goes to great pains, over hundreds of pages in his book, to relate the various disasters that befell mankind as Venus loomed hugely in the sky. All of these events call for Venus to get pretty close to the Earth. At one point, to explain such things as manna falling from heaven and the Egyptian plague of vermin, he states that Venus gets so close that its atmosphere flows into the Earth’s own air.

This premise, that manna and insects came from Venus to the Earth, is suspect at best. We now know that the surface of Venus has an incredibly high temperature, over 900° Celsius (1,600° Fahrenheit), hot enough to melt lead. It’s difficult to imagine what kind of bug could survive such withering heat. It’s also hard to see how manna — a life-sustaining compound — could form on Venus. After all, the atmosphere of Venus is mostly carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. If a few billion tons of these substances gets dumped into the air here on Earth, the effect would hardly be conducive to life. Quite the opposite.

There are other physical effects of a Venusian near miss. Despite its differences, Venus does have some similarities to the Earth. They have almost exactly the same mass and diameter. That means they have about the same gravity. For the air of Venus to flow onto the Earth, there would need to be about an equal pull from both planets on the air, with a little bit more of a pull from the Earth. Even being outrageously generous, their nearly equal gravity means that Venus would have to be closer than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) from the surface of the Earth.

Imagine! A planet the size of the Earth passing just 1,000 kilometers overhead would be just about the most terrifying event I can imagine. Venus would literally fill the sky, blocking out the Sun and stars. Even at interplanetary velocities it would be vastly huge in the sky for days or weeks, and would be brighter than hundreds of full Moons.

Yet, no mention of this incredible spectacle is made in ancient texts.

Worse, the tides from Venus on the Earth would be huge, kilometers high. The earthquakes would have been more than terrible; they would have destroyed everything, and I mean everything. It would make the sweatiest vision of biblical apocalypse look like a warm spring day. That close a pass by something like Venus would have sterilized the surface of the Earth, killing every living thing on it. Had it happened, Velikovsky wouldn’t have been around to write his book. To his credit, Velikovsky assumes that there would have been earthquakes and the like, but he underestimates the effect of such a near passage by a factor of millions.

Even granting that humanity somehow survived this apocalypse, there is still a problem. The Moon orbits the Earth at a distance of 400,000 kilometers. If Venus were to get so close to the Earth that it could actually exchange atmospheric contents, it would have to get closer to us than the Moon. If that had happened, the Moon’s orbit would be drastically changed. Usually when you take three objects, two of them massive and one less so, and let them interact gravitationally, the least massive one is ejected from the system completely. In other words, under almost every circumstance, had Venus come that close to the Earth, the Moon would have literally been flung into interplanetary space. At the very least its orbit would have been profoundly changed, made tremendously elliptical.

The orbit of the Moon is elliptical, but nowhere near as stretched out as it would have been after a close encounter with Venus. The very fact that the Moon — and we, too — are here at all shows that Velikovsky was wrong.

There’s still one more thing. The Hebrew calendar, still going strong after nearly 5,800 years, is based on cycles of the Moon. Any passage by Venus would have changed the length of time it takes the Moon to orbit the Earth. Yet, if we look to the Hebrew calendar, we see that it hasn’t changed for nearly six millennia. The events described by Velikovsky took place 3,500 years ago, thousands of years after the Hebrews started their calendar. This means that the Moon’s orbit has not changed measurably since long before the biblical disasters took place.

Remember, Velikovsky used ancient texts to support his beliefs. Yet, here we see that one of the most basic of all ancient tools, the calendar, directly and completely refutes his hypothesis. Had Venus done any of the things Velikovsky claimed, the Moon’s orbit would have changed.

Finally, according to Velikovsky, after Venus was done palpating and poking the Earth, it finally calmed down and settled into its present orbit. Remember, if this happened it’s far more likely that Venus’ orbit would be a highly eccentric ellipse rather than a circle. Yet Venus has the most circular orbit of all the planets, matched only by Neptune. If we accept that Venus actually went through all these Velikovskian gyrations, we would at least expect it to have some mild eccentricity, yet Venus’ orbit is difficult to distinguish from a perfect circle.

Later in his book, Velikovsky tried to explain how all the orbits of the moons and planets could have become more circular. He proposed that there is an electromagnetic force that emanates from the planets and the Sun, and indeed it is this force that flipped the Earth over and created all the problems. However, today we see absolutely no evidence whatsoever that such a force exists in anywhere near the strength needed to do a fraction of what he claims. If such a force ever existed, it stopped working shortly after the events described in the Book of Exodus. Also, if such a force existed, why are some planets’ and moons’ orbits not perfect circles, or even close to them? We see some objects on highly elliptical orbits; comets are a good example. Why didn’t this force affect them?

So, Velikovsky would have us believe that all these biblical disasters occurred due to some mysterious force, unknown in nature, that came to the planets, did its nefarious deeds — but only on some objects, ignoring others — and then evaporated again. It left not a trace on the planets, either, as the solar system looks exactly like it had evolved naturally over billions of years.

This is not science. In fact, it would be just as legitimate to invoke the Hand of God. In other words, there is hardly a need for Velikovsky to go to such great lengths to try to get science to corroborate his beliefs. His use of a force unknown to science negates the entire purpose of writing the book in the first place, which was to find a scientific grounding for ancient texts.

So if Velikovsky was so utterly and obviously wrong, why do so many people still follow his work and think he was right?

This question is more philosophical than practical. However, part of the answer lies in the way the scientific community treated Velikovsky when he published his book.

Initially, in 1950, when the Macmillan publishing house was preparing the manuscript for publication, the scientific community caught a whiff of it. In particular, a Harvard astronomer named Harlow Shapley wrote several vitriolic letters to the editors at Macmillan saying — correctly, mind you — that Velikovsky’s ideas were wrong, and that Macmillan was doing everyone a big disservice by publishing them. At the time Macmillan was a very large publisher of scientific textbooks, and Shapley said that the publisher’s reputation would be damaged by selling Worlds in Collision. From what I have read, there were intimations, although not direct threats, that Shapley would use his considerable reputation to pressure other scientists to boycott Macmillan’s books.

This was a serious problem for the publisher. When Velikovsky’s book came out it rocketed onto the bestseller list, no doubt aided by the controversy. It was a huge money maker. Macmillan, however, also made a lot of money from textbooks. In one of the worst publishing decisions ever, bowing to the pressure, they transferred the rights to Worlds in Collision and its sequels to Doubleday, which suddenly found themselves printing a book they couldn’t keep on the shelves. This only added to the book’s mystique, aiding its sales.

With sales booming, the scientific pressure against Velikovsky continued. His book became a favorite among