Just found it
The public library system has a copy of Velikovsky’s ‘Worlds in collision” which Pascal and others reccomend to me.
I have sort of wanted to read it for a long time, at least partly because it espouses a theory that has always fascinated me; the idea that Natural Law can be changed.
A good number of folks have poo-pooed V. because his stuff is so “Obviously” wrong. Certainly, based on what we know about celestial mechanics, his conjectures don’t work; I know that pencilnecked geek Carl Sagan made a big point of pointing out he was wrong, but Sagan utterly missed the point, I think.
When most people think of”God” they think of- well, I don’t know. Hairy thunderer or cosmic muffin?
I think of God as the Ultimate Scientist. The Creator of the Universe. The architect of life. The Author of Natural Law. When people think about how wonderful Jesus was, I say, sure, he was great. Listen, have you ever even tried to imagine the incomprehensible complexity that takes you from the vacuum of nothing to the simplicity of the atom, let alone the remarkable diversity of life?
If the Creator of the Universe is the Author of Natural Law, he can just as readily scratch out passages in that book, and write new laws, at his will. I think Velikovsky merely looked at the occurrence of biblical/historical events and theorized that they occurred because of the Creator making revisions or at least temporary modifications in Natural Law; anti-theists will discount this out of hand because it relies on the possibility of a supreme being with ultimate control, which they cannot of course abide.
I have ordered the book, it will be pulled from the main branch and delivered to my local library which is walking distance away. I expect it to be dry and hard to read, but I’ve been down that road before, I’m not a stranger to complex shit.
What I need to understand is, is Velikovsky a reasonable but misunderstood man, or is he Erich von Däniken?
18 comments Og | Uncategorized
I am very anxious to hear you reactions to this book. May need to track it down and read it myself.
I think of God in much the same way you do, and I stand in awe of the complexity of His creation.
SF novelist James P. Hogan (whom I just found out died in July 2010…who knew?) treated the Velikovsky theory in Cradle of Saturn and at least one subsequent novel.
I wasn’t all that impressed with either the theory or the novel.
As far as “God sticking His hand into the world post-Creation” plots go, I was more impressed by Robert J. Sawyer’s Calculating God.
I want to read it to find out if he was a bright man doing a thought experiment, or a Chariots of the gods-esque kook. As of now, I do not know.
I read it long ago. What I was confounding to me was not that he researched other historical and legendary records to see if there were other incidents that lined up with Biblical lore.
It was how he made his jumps to his predictions that were actually pretty amazing. Too many of his predictions, all that were ran against scientific consensus mid 20th Century, turned out correct.
To me it was as if he had taken a trip into the future and had read of all the cosmic discoveries that ran against that consensus, and then he returned to 1946 when he wrote the book and made up the rest so as to have an excuse to make those predictions. Radiation belt around the planet. Check. High percentage of argon in Martian atmosphere, Check. Radio noises from Jupiter. Check. High contest of sulphuric acid in Venus’ atmosphere. Check.
And it is not a dry read. He’s actually pretty entertaining as he ties the stories you already know to those of other cultures. He’s not a von Daniken because he’s not trying to convince us that it’s all due to little green men, only that there may be cosmic forces that may have come into play when the equilibrium of a gravity well is messed with. We still don’t know why gravity is, only that it’s the most powerful natural force in the universe.
V was an original. VD was somewhat of a mocker of V which probably why he was never attacked as vehemently as was V.
If the earth stopped spinning on its axis suddenly, the skeptics all go whole hog and say that all building would fall down flat and we’d all go flying off into space. After all the earth’s surface is moving at 1000 miles per hour. But not if the stoppage occurred over several minutes or hours. They never hear that because it runs against their purpose.
What their best response would be: And that’s before you account for the earth’s mass and momentum.
But what force actually keeps her spinning? Do we have experiments showing us how and why her spins varies at all?
It all comes down to whether eye witness accounts can be trusted at all. What I don’t trust is he who tries to convince me that he is the enlightened ones and anybody 3000 years ago had to be benighted and foolish. Oh what an egocentric beast man has always been.
Velikovsky has done a huge amount of research on myths, stories, legends, etc, but had no real background in physics. I remember reading the book in high school, and finding it hard to believe even with my limited experience (beginning calculus and college physics). I think he has a great collection of stories, but I can’t really go along with some of the rest, especially after going further in math and the sciences.
Just my opinion.
“but I can’t really go along with some of the rest, especially after going further in math and the sciences.”
yes, exactly misses the whole point, as far as I can see. According to the accepted rules of math and physics, what V proposed was not only wrong but crazy.
The point is to expand your awareness to the concept that- to suit his purposes- the Creator of the Universe can temporarily- or permanently- rewrite natural law.
It’s not even that Og. The scientific community wanted to discount the speculation that arises should there be physical laws that we can’t witness today that come into play. In today’s solar system, the circumstances that V describes could not exist. But what if that situation changed, then there might be some other phenomenon that would be observed and could be then theorized and quantified. Because those circumstances do not occur in modern man’s presence, there is no need to speculate. Unless there was something to learn from the speuclation, which is what always intrigued me. While that is not hard science, it is the stuff that attracts the scientific mind. However, without a massive cosmic interplay going on in our backyard, whatever natural forces that we don’t see now that might then come into play is beyond our ability to test the hypothesis.
In my opinion, there had to be other more political reasons to have come down on V as hard as Shapely et alii did. I suspect strongly that it may have been a reason which they chose not to admit.
What I was trying to say, is that there very well be natural laws we are not able to witness today, that does not mean they are not in place, only that they are entirely in the realm of speculation. It would be the Creator’s surprise, especially so for those of us who are oh-so-assured-of ourselves, should similar circumstances ever occur again.
Pascal asked: But what force actually keeps her spinning?
None.
Momentum isn’t a force, it’s just a property of matter.
(And the Earth’s spin is slowing over time, thanks to interaction with Moon.
Eventually we should be in a tidally-locked system with it, in a bazillion years.)
Understood Sigi. Whatever force started her spinning would continue in the absence of a countervailing force such as friction. And I have noticed her fluctuations in spin rate that are announced each time the bureau of standards clock is adjusted. Whatever might have happened to give the residents of this world the impression that the sun stood still for a couple of short time spans cannot be explained by physics, but I am loath to simply write the lore off as group hysteria or of ignorance. Postmodern man has proven to be far more ignorant, and by choice: witness algore and his lettered charlatans .
I must find it again… read his stuff and found it interesting albeit bizarre at the time. Did not know God either then.
“Whatever might have happened to give the residents of this world the impression that the sun stood still for a couple of short time spans cannot be explained by physics,”
May I suggest the book “Ghosts of the Air”by Martin Caidin? It describes several incidents on Kwajalein, M.I.
where time was lost according to a battery of atomic clocks sequenced with another set in California.
I read this work about 8 months ago. While intrigued, I was ultimately unimpressed. Or shall I say unconvinced. For a more sci-fi fantasy based take, I suggest Allan Eckert’s The HAB Theory.
Velociman — Allan Eckert of “The Frontiersman” and “The Wilderness War” among other books about early American History?
Pascal, another prediction was the high temperature of Venus, which no one even into the early 70’s believed.
Windy, I chose not to mention the high temp of Venus in my comment only because the only word he used to describe it was “incandescent.” Now I always knew that meant hot, and 800°C is indeed hotter than anything explained satisfactorily by any greenhouse theory. (I’d love to see the hypothesists prove that theory by duplicating it. –crickets–).
But what absolutely nobody had predicted was the high concentration of sulfuric acid in the Venusian atmosphere. He gets the prize for pulling that rabbit out of the hat for sure.
However — and I’ve told this to Og who is about to find out himself — there wasn’t a single one of V’s huge number of correct predictions that he showed anyone the logic of how he got there. Know what I mean? He never did “If we find A, and then we find B, then therefore expect C.” He never showed why it was “therefore expect.” He simply asserted it. This is why I fantasized that time traveling Velikovsky explanation. I don’t know anyone who can duplicate how he made his predictions, only that he was right. It’s NOT science when others cannot duplicate your work. Simple as that. Nevertheless, those were still right.
I’m telling you all, he was supremely accurate in all his predictions. (He had so many right ones (maybe 20), his vilifiers had to make up wrong ones as straw man arguments. I remember only a few of those).
Another thing in V’s favor. The consensus that was mounted against him was the precursor for the big scam in the name of science today. You know: how some rent seeking charlatans ridicule as “deniers” their colleagues who don’t go along with the AGWF.
Oh, I remember the most calumnious attack on V’s predictions.
It was a prof at UCLA whose lecture I attended circa 1975 (and for which I have a couple of cassette tapes buried away somewhere). I don’t remember his name, but I do remember his argument.
How did he explain the large number of V’s predictions (and this was long before we had visited Venus to get those verifications). He resorted to:
“If put an army of chimpanzees in a room with typewriters, they’d eventually type out the works of Shakespeare.”
He changed the subject when asked “So then, where are the millions of his incorrect predictions?”