[2] For example, Lady Wonder, a horse from Virginia, could answer questions by arranging lettered wood blocks with her nose. Since she also replied to queries posed privately to her owner, she was pronounced not only literate but telepathic by the parapsychologist J. B. Rhine (
[3] A detailed discussion of the Pioneer 10 and 11 plaque can be found in my book
[4] The ancient Egyptian phrase for the planet Mars translates to “the red Horns,” Horns being the imperial falcon deity. Thus Egyptian astronomy noted remarkable coloration in celestial objects. But the description of Sirius mentions nothing notable about its color.
[5] Citations to references in this chapter are given at the end of the book.
[6] The page numbers refer to the canonical English-language edition (Velikovsky, 1950).
[7] Actually,
[8] The prediction of the relative motions of three objects attracted to each other gravitationally.
[9] An informative and entertaining discussion of the Thera case, and the whole question of the connection of myth with geological events, can be found in the book by Vitaliano (1973); see also de Camp (1975).
[10] Kowal has also recently discovered a very interesting small object orbiting the Sun between the orbits of Uranus and Saturn. It may be the largest member of a new asteroid belt. Kowal proposes calling it Chiron, after the centaur who educated many Greek mythological gods and heroes. If other trans-Saturnian asteroids are discovered, they can be named after other centaurs.
[11] Unexpected discoveries are useful for calibrating pre-existing ideas. G. W. F. Hegel has had a very powerful imprint on professional philosophy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a profound influence on the future of the world because Karl Marx took him very seriously (although sympathetic critics have argued that Marx’s arguments would have been more compelling had he never heard of Hegel). In 1799 or 1800 Hegel confidently stated, using presumably the full armamentarium of philosophy available to him, that no new celestial objects could exist within the solar system. One year later, the asteroid Ceres was discovered. Hegel then seems to have returned to pursuits less amenable to disproof.
[12] In manned Earth orbital flights, still other problems arise. Consider a religious Muslim or Jew circling the Earth once every ninety minutes. Is he obligated to celebrate the Sabbath every seventh orbit? Spaceflight provides access to environments very different from those in which we and our customs have grown up.
[13] In a commencement address at Clark University on May 18, 1978, I made some similar remarks. Dorothy Mosakowski in the Rare Book Room at Clark’s Goddard Memorial Library then searched for and found this little essay which had been listed as lost. In it we discover that Goddard was attracted to but cautious about the possibility of life on Mars, certain of the existence of extrasolar planetary systems and deduced “that among these countless planets there are conditions of heat and light equivalent to those we experience; and if this is the case, and the planet is near our age and size, there may very likely exist human beings like ourselves, probably with strange costumes and still stranger manners.” But he also says: “It is for the distant future to answer if we will ever realize truth from our surmises.”
[14] Although, remarkably, he was in Worcester in the year 1909 when Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung gave the first comprehensive discussion in the English language of those institutionalized insights called psychoanalysis. Many American psychiatrists got their first glimpses of the subject from Freud’s Clark University lectures. One wonders if the middle-aged bearded Viennese physician and the young mustachioed American physics graduate student nodded to each other in passing on the Clark University campus, on their way to their separate destinies.
[15] With the sole exception of the meteorites (see Chapter 15).
[16] I have discussed these successful inferences and their spacecraft confirmations in Chapters 12, 16 and 17 of
[17] White seems also to have been responsible for the exemplary custom of not awarding honorary doctoral degrees at Cornell University: he was concerned about a potential abuse, that honorary degrees would be traded for financial gifts and bequests. White was a man of strong and courageous ethical standards.
[18] Many statements about God are confidently made by theologians on grounds