Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

which was becoming a more dominant and controlling force in society.

Velikovsky’s ideas and the evidence he and his followers say supports those ideas have been examined in detail elsewhere (Sagan 1981; Goldsmith 1977; Stiebing 1984), and the interested reader is referred to these sources for further discussion. The following pages will briefly analyze Velikovsky’s ideas and point out some of the major flaws, incorrect statements, and misinterpretations to be found.

Velikovsky says Venus is a recent addition to the solar system and that it first appeared about 1500 B.C.E. If this is true, then there should be no written record of the planet before that time. Huber (1977) has examined ancient records and found that Venus was mentioned as the morning and evening star by at least 1900 B.C.E. Sumerian tablets speak of a goddess or star manna as the morning and evening star. Venus was observed and worshipped in Babylon in the sixteenth century B.C.E. and, as Huber notes, the observations show that it was in its present orbital position at that time and that it stayed in that position. There is no mention of any wandering about, as Velikovsky claims.

Of course, records of such wandering-about might be missing due to Velikovsky’s hypothesized worldwide amnesia. This is obviously an irrefutable hypothesis and, in any case, does not explain why we find records of Venus before Velikovsky says it existed.

Sagan (1981) has discussed in detail the astrophysical problems with Velikovsky’s theories. Velikovsky says that Venus was ejected as a comet by Jupiter. How? What was the power source? None is ever specified by Velikovsky. The event just “happened.” But, if it happened, Venus would have had to be moving fast enough to escape from Jupiter’s massive gravitational pull. In other words, Venus would have had to reach escape velocity. But Venus is very massive, and the amount of energy needed for it to reach escape velocity is huge—so huge that any rocky comet would have been melted before it could escape. So Venus’s escape from Jupiter is impossible. Even if it were somehow possible, the escape velocity for Jupiter is sixty kilometers per second and escape velocity for the solar system is sixty-three kilometers per second (Sagan 1981). Thus, there is an extremely narrow velocity range that would allow Venus to escape from Jupiter, yet stay in the solar system.

Further, Velikovsky never specifies any real mechanism for Earth’s rotation stopping and starting as Venus passes by. The stops and starts must have taken place in only a few hours. If that were so, why wasn’t everything on the planet tossed off into space? After all, the speed of Earth’s rotation is just over a thousand miles per hour. If that speed were reduced sharply over a short period of time, almost everything on the planet other than mountains would fly off into space as a result of inertia.

According to Velikovsky, at least a considerable portion of the craters on the Moon were created in historical times while Venus was whizzing about the solar system. Studies have shown, however, that the craters on the moon are millions of years older than Velikovsky claims. And if the cosmic events of which Velikovsky speaks caused craters on the moon, they should also have made craters on Earth. Such recent craters simply do not exist on Earth. Sagan (1981) discusses other points of lunar geology that show Velikovsky’s theories to be wrong.

If Venus were born of Jupiter, the composition of these two planets should be very similar. In reality, the compositions of Venus and Jupiter are extremely different. Jupiter is made up largely of hydrogen and helium gases. Venus is a solid planet, about five times denser than Jupiter, with a nickel and iron composition like that of Earth. Nor is the atmosphere of Venus like that of Jupiter. Venus’s atmosphere is a combination of carbon dioxide with some clouds that contain about 80 percent sulfuric acid.

Velikovsky’s lack of scientific expertise is shown by his interchangeable use of the words hydrocarbons and carbohydrates. Thus, Velikovsky says that the manna that fell from heaven and fed the Israelites came from the tail of the comet Venus. It seems that comets’ tails have been shown to contain hydrocarbon fragments. Hydrocarbons are organic compounds containing only carbon and hydrogen (acetylene is an example). Carbohydrates are organic compounds such as sugars and starches. They are good to eat, but they are not found in comets. Not knowing the difference between the two, Velikovsky assumed they were the same.

Velikovsky and his followers often claim that his theory made several correct predictions about the nature and characteristics of the planets. One such prediction concerns the temperature of Venus and Mars. Velikovsky said in Worlds in Collision (1950) that Venus was hot. Although his precise meaning is unclear, he apparently meant that Venus was giving off more heat to space than it was receiving from the Sun (Sagan 1981). This additional heat was said to have come from Venus’s cometary travels when it passed close to the Sun. Velikovsky also said that Mars gives off more heat than it receives from the Sun, heat received when it encountered Venus in its travels. Neither Venus nor Mars radiates more heat than it receives from the Sun. In this sense, then, both of Velikovsky’s predictions were wrong. When it was discovered in the early 1970s that the surface temperature of Venus was high, about 850 degrees Fahrenheit, Velikovsky and his followers changed the nature of the prediction after the fact and claimed that it was correct. They conveniently forgot the prediction about Mars, which is wrong no matter how one interprets it. As Sagan says, there is a “planetary double standard at work” (p. 245).

From start to finish, Velikovsky’s ideas are the work of an erudite crackpot with a great ability to convince the scientifically untrained (himself included) that there was a great deal of validity in his ideas that establishment scientists were trying to suppress. As noted above, the initial response of the scientific community to Velikovsky was undisguised contempt and scorn. In the 1970s, as scientists began to see the importance of examining even very unusual theories and communicating the results of these investigations to the public, considerable effort has been directed toward a careful examination of Velikovsky’s ideas. A symposium on the topic was held at the 1974 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This conference is the major annual meeting for American scientists from all disciplines. A symposium at such a conference certainly belies the charge of closed-mindedness so frequently made by Velikovsky and his followers. The proceedings of the symposium were later published (Goldsmith 1977).

In chapter 1 it was noted that one characteristic of a pseudoscience is an unwillingness to change the theory to take into account new knowledge. In a 1972 speech at Harvard University Velikovsky correctly stated that science textbooks from the 1950s were now “antiquated.” He went on to say that his theories were just as valid in 1972 as in 1950. In other words, the vast advances in knowledge of astronomy, astrophysics, planetary geology, and related fields that had occurred in that twenty-two-year span were irrelevant to the validity of his theories. Velikovsky’s attitude can be contrasted with those of establishment scientists faced with revolutionary advances in knowledge.

In the past few years a major change has taken place in astronomers’ views of how the moon was formed. The view now widely held is that the Moon was formed 4.5 billion years ago by a collision between the then-cooling Earth and another, smaller planet about the size of Mars (Gleick 1986; Taylor 1987). A typical response to the theory is that of Dr. H. J. Melosh of the University of Arizona, who was a “typical skeptic” regarding the theory. Quoted in Gleick, he said:

I was sort of an expert on impact cratering, and people hadn’t really looked at what happens during impact. So I decided to do it and get rid of this insane idea [that the Moon resulted from planetary impact] once and for all. Instead, what I found within weeks is that the physics of what happened during an impact event agrees extremely well [with the impact theory]. The more I looked the more I thought that the giant impact theory was the only one that could explain what we saw. (p. C3)

Here is a typical example of a scientist who completely changes his mind in the space of a few weeks because he is confronted with evidence that his previous ideas were wrong. Gleick (1986) and Taylor (1987) describe in some detail the other evidence that has convinced so many astronomers that the impact theory is correct.

Why was this impact theory accepted, while those of Velikovsky were rejected? Velikovsky presented no evidence to support his ideas. He merely surrounded them with a forest of abstruse citations, many of which were inaccurate. Even more important, the impact theory of lunar formation makes predictions that are found to be correct when tested. Whenever a testable hypothesis could be wrung from Velikovsky’s theory, it was found to be wrong.