Immanuel Velikovsky

Immanuel Velikovsky

As we have discussed at some length elsewhere, the ideas of Immnuel Velikovsky are almost certainly wrong. Astronomers do not object to the idea of major collisions in space, only to major recent collisions. In any model of the solar system it is impossible to show the sizes of the planets on the same scale as their orbits, because the planets would then be almost too small to see.

If the planets were really shown to scale, as grains of dust, we would easily note that the chance of collision of a particular comet with the Earth in a few thousand years is extraordinarily low. Moreover, Venus is a rocky and metallic, hydrogen-poor planet, whereas Jupiter – where Velikovsky supposed it comes from – is made almost entirely of hydrogen. There are no energy sources for comets or planets to be ejected by Jupiter.

If one passed by the Earth, it could not “stop” the Earth’s rotation, much less start it up again at twenty-four hours a day. No geological evidence supports the idea of an unusual frequency of vulcanism or floods 3,500 years ago. There are Mesopotamian inscriptions referring to Venus that predate the time when Velikovsky says Venus changed from a comet into a planet: The Adda cylinder seal, dating from the middle of the third millennium B.C., prominently displays Inanna, the goddess of Venus, the morning star, and precursor of the Babylonian Istar.

The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge. Image : Alien Illusion © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

It is very unlikely that an object in such a highly elliptical orbit could be rapidly moved into the nearly perfect circular orbit of present-day Venus… And so on.

In fact, many hypotheses proposed by scientists as well as by non-scientists turn out to be wrong. But science is a self-correcting enterprise. To be accepted, all ideas must survive rigorous standards of evidence. The worst aspect of the Velikovsky affair is not that his hypotheses were wrong or in contradiction to firmly established facts, but that some who called themselves scientists attempted to suppress Velikovsky’s work. Science is generated by and devoted to free inquiry: the idea that any hypothesis, no matter how strange, deserves to be considered on its merits.

The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavour of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundament new insights.