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Velikovsky's /Worlds In Collision/

© Copyright 1997, Jim Loy

Years ago, someone told me of an exciting book, /Worlds In Collision/,
by Immanuel Velikovsky. As an amateur astronomer, I was intrigued by the
title. And the paperback that I bought had this praise on the cover:

*... literary earthquake.*
/New York Times/
*... a stupendous panorama of terrestrial and human histories ...*
/New York Herald Tribune/
*Fascinating as a tale by Jules Verne, yet documented with scholarship
worthy of Darwin.*
/Reader's Digest/
*If you want an intellectual jolt read /Worlds In Collision/ by Dr.
Immanuel Velikovsky.*
/Book of the Month Club News/
*... will have an explosive effect on the world of science.*
/This Week/
*Startling, astounding, amazing and certainly revolutionary story of the
universe.*
/Dallas Times-Herald/
*It could be a book that will affect the thinking of the ages.*
/Louisville Courier-Journal/
*A strange and wonderful book.*
/Detroit News/
*Gigantic, sensational, staggering.*
/Glasgow (Scotland) Daily Record/
*Nothing in recent years has so excited the public imagination.*
/Pageant/
*His final conclusions are even world shaking.*
/Newsweek/

Great, so far. And then, as I began reading, it was easy to see that
this man knew nothing about physics and astronomy. The physical science
is laughable. I joyfully read along, until I came to this statement
about his hypothetical comet:

Meanwhile, the tail of the comet and its head, having become
entangled with each other by their close contact with the earth,
exchanged violent discharges of electricity.

It is hard to imagine what he means by the tail and head becoming
entangled with each other, as the tail is a cloud of thin gases. It is
not a very scientific description, whatever it describes. It was
distressing to imagine reading 300 more pages of such drivel.

The main idea of the book is that Velikovsky deduced catastrophic
astronomical events from ancient historical documents (such as the
Bible, which Harper Brothers gave him permission to quote) and from
myths of numerous cultures. We have planets zooming around the solar
system, colliding and nearly colliding, in the last few thousand years.
Jupiter expelled a huge comet, which eventually became Venus. This comet
nearly collided with Earth in about 1500 BC, causing the plagues of
Egypt, and the parting of the Red Sea, and nourished the Children of
Israel with manna (which he says is made of hydrocarbons from the
comet), and made the earth stop spinning when Joshua commanded the sun
to stand still. The earth started spinning again. Then the comet zoomed
to Mars, throwing Mars out of its orbit. Mars then nearly collided with
Earth, destroying the army of Sennacherib. Mars settled into its present
orbit, and the comet became Venus, settling into its orbit.

Wow! The planets must have breathed a sigh of relief. It's hard to know
where to start. For one thing, nobody's ever detected hydrocarbons in a
comet, and you can't eat them and survive for long. Jupiter does not
emit comets. Near collisions with comets (or planets) are very rare, and
repeated near collisions are very very very rare. Planets do not easily
settle into nearly-circular orbits, such as the current orbits of Venus
and Mars. This would be essentially impossible in the current state of
the Solar System. A planet causing the Earth to stop spinning, and then
starting it spinning again, doesn't make a lot of sense (and would
probably wipe out all life on Earth at the very least, if it did make
sense).

The previous paragraph (mine) is fairly brief. But scientifically, it is
hundreds of times more logical than the bogus physics in Velikovsky's book.

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I received email from a man who was dismayed by my opinions concerning
Velikovsky, who was apparently the most amazing person that this man had
ever met. Velikovsky may have had brains to spare. But he had no
knowledge of astronomy and physics. His book is a joke.

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