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The Acceptance of Correct Ideas in Science

Should the question be asked why my books caused such great enmity and
agitation (several writers have compared it with the violent natural
events I described), the answer should not be simplified into the
formula--"because the theories argued in them run counter to the
established views." Such an explanation requires elaboration within a
larger historical perspective.

Fundamentally, it has been true that any new concept that carried
seeds of truth and dispensed with many accepted tenets was apt to
provoke some opposition. But this is not all. There must be deeper
reasons for the extraordinary outburst on the part of the scientific
community that greeted and pursued my works. This manifested itself in
immense efforts to make me appear to be unscientific or unscholarly,
an outcast, and my work of no worth.

The cases of Galileo, Darwin, and Pasteur were often brought into
comparison by many reviewers and numerous correspondents. But. without
losing historical perspective, the attacks in these cases were far
less vituperative, far more mixed with praise, than the attacks made
on the substance of Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval, and
personally upon their author.

Galileo was received in many honorary assemblies with great pomp, even
by the Pope himself: the initial unwillingness to believe what Galileo
saw through the telescope soon turned into great admiration for his
achievement. A case in point is Clavius, author of the Gregorian
calendar reform. At first a vehement opponent of Galileo, Christopher
Clavius, with other Jesuits of the Roman College, repeated Galileo's
observations in 1611, a year after Galileo published his Sidereus
Nuncius. "John Adam Schall von Bell, later to be the first European
director of the Chinese Bureau of Astronomy, was present as a young
man in the hall of the Roman College in May 1611 when Galileo received
a triumphant welcome from Clavius and his mathematicians after their
confirmation of his discoveries."^[4](1) It was the scorn to which
Galileo exposed the Pope, putting his views on cosmology into the
mouth of Simplicius, that caused Galileo's brush with the Inquisition.

From the beginning, Darwin had many followers among scientists; and
actually not he as much as his opponents were the targets of
emotionally charged abuse. It was Huxley, not Bishop Wilberforce--the
main opponent of Darwin--who in their famous encounter lost his temper
and used insulting language.

Pasteur had envious and disbelieving colleagues, and some scientists
in exalted positions, like Virchow, did not hurry to his side; yet
Lord Lister did so. Before long Pasteur's name rang throughout Europe,
and people traveled to his laboratory -- this despite the fact that
Pasteur had no formal medical training, as Darwin had no formal
training in natural history. Darwin's only degree was that of Bachelor
of Theology.

Galileo, Darwin and Pasteur, the standard examples of the persecution
to which innovators are subjected, did not experience nearly as much
abuse, either in sheer quantity (though the comparative scarcity of
the press in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries needs to be
taken into account), or in its intensity, as became the lot of the
author of Worlds in Collision.

In the history of science only the case of Copernicus caused a
comparable objection and agitation. But Copernicus spared himself the
abuse by the intentional postponement of the publication of his book
until his very death. In his last days he was persuaded by his only
pupil. Rheticus, to permit him to publish his work, De Revolutionibus,
which he dedicated to Pope Paul III. On May 24, 1543, a few hours
before Copernicus died, the first copy was put in his hands. In it he
said:

"I can easily conceive . . . that as soon as some people learn that
in this book which I have written concerning the revolutions of the
heavenly bodies, I ascribe certain motions to the Earth, they will
cry out at once that I and my theory should be rejected.
Accordingly, when I considered in my own mind how absurd a
performance it might seem to those who know that the judgement of
many centuries has approved the view that the Earth remains fixed
as center in the midst of heaven, if I should on the contrary
assert that the Earth moves -- when I considered this carefully,
the contempt which I had to fear because of the novelty and
apparent absurdity of my view, nearly induced me to abandon the
work I had begun. How did it occur to me to venture, contrary to
the accepted view of the mathematicians, and well-nigh contrary to
common sense, to form any conception of any terrestrial motion
whatsoever?"

The only opposition Copernicus experienced in his lifetime was not
from the Catholic Church, but from Martin Luther who, having heard of
the theory of the Canon of Frauenburg, spoke against the "new
astrologer who wanted to prove that the earth was moving and revolving
rather than the heaven and the firmament, sun and moon. . . . This
fool wants to turn the whole area of astronomy upside down. But as the
Holy Scripture testifies, Joshua ordered the sun to stand still, not
the earth!"

The Copernican theory was, as its author saw in advance, silenced for
almost a hundred years' scientists were afraid to study or to teach it
the only exception being Giordano Bruno. After nine months in the
dungeon of the Venetian Inquisition and seven years in the cell of the
Roman Inquisition, Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome for his
denial of the Immaculate Conception--a theological heresy--and for his
teaching of the Copernican theory, which he extended by claiming the
plurality of worlds. For Bruno, the fixed stars were not lights
attached to an enormous sphere that bounded the universe, as
Copernicus thought them to be. They were suns, like our Sun, encircled
by planets, and some of these he believed were populated by
intelligent beings. "You are perchance more afraid to pronounce your
judgement," Bruno said at the last hearing of the tribunal, "than I am
to hear it." On February 17, 1600, from the pile of faggots kindled in
Campo dei Fiori in Rome, he was sent to the Inferno by the
Inquisition.

These were no longer the dark Middle Ages. It was an illustrious time.
The same year, 1600, Shakespeare wrote his Hamlet, Bacon had published
his Essays in 1597, and both of them remained steadfast adherents of
the Ptolemaic, geocentric system of the world, almost one hundred
years after Copernicus. Bruno had spent his time and zeal in England,
having made only one convert--William Gilbert, who published his great
opus, De Magnete, in the same 1600. But when I said that Bruno was
despised and pursued by both the Church and by scientists, I had in my
mind that Galileo, whose later (1633) detention by the Inquisition was
of a much shorter duration, in no book and in no letter of his
enormous extant correspondence mentioned Bruno. Johannes Kepler, whose
great discoveries became known as Kepler's Laws, himself wrote of
Bruno's concept of the plurality of worlds as that "horrible theory."

It was this that Bruno feared most: and though Bruno's ideas are
acknowledged to have been the greatest influence on Spinoza's (17th
Century) pantheism, he otherwise was all but forgotten for fully two
hundred years and rediscovered only in the nineteenth century. God's
mills grind slowly. In August of 1597, Galileo wrote to Kepler:

"Many years ago I became a convert to the opinions of Copernicus,
and by that theory have succeeded in fully explaining many
phenomena which on the contrary hypothesis are altogether
inexplicable. I have drawn up many arguments and confutations of
the opposite opinions, which however I have not hitherto dared to
publish, fearful of meeting the same fate as our master Copernicus
who, although he has earned for himself immortal fame amongst a
few, yet amongst the greater number appears as only worthy of
hooting and derision: so great is the number of fools."

Galileo became bolder only when, having observed Jupiter and its
satellites through his telescope, he recognized a structure similar to
that described by Copernicus: a sun encircled by planets. But his open
defense of the Copernican theory caused a storm of opposition.

What was so unacceptable in the heliocentric system? Most generally it
threatened humankind's psychological need for the feeling of security,
itself most probably based on a deep hidden insecurity. A moving Earth
is a less secure place than an unmoveable one. Additionally, mankind
was denied the central role in the universe. This not only was
injurious to his ego but was also interpreted to be in conflict with
the tenets of the Christian Church. Did Jesus come just to a very
secondary planet, one of many? But more than these considerations, the
awakened feeling of insecurity was the basis of the great anguish that
greeted the belated announcement of the Copernican theory.

Man as a species needs security from the elements, from the beasts;
and not until he aggregated into communities and built shelters and
walls could he feel himself protected from the outrages of nature and
from the predatory animals. But it was not the daily vicissitudes of
the ever-lurking predators that put such deep-seated fear into his
soul: it was the great derailment of this planet on its travels that
left its deepest impression on him; and as the deepest traumas are put
in oblivion in the soul of an individual, so also is the case with
humankind.

It was very unpleasant, therefore, to find out that the Earth, the
whole Earth under our feet, moves. (How spontaneously and
instinctively correct when the entire population of a city runs
outside in panic at the first rumblings of an earthquake.) Later it
was also very unpleasant to be told by the biologists that animal
species are not immutable, that there is change and evolution in the
animal kingdom, and that these natural mechanisms had produced
humankind itself. Still more recently, it was markedly unpleasant to
learn from psychoanalysis that man's motives are not always those that
he thinks; that in his instincts he is much more primitive and animal
than he wishes to admit: and that consciousness thus has
understructures of an unconscious mind, and that these are quaking and
uncontrollable domains, ruling over his conscious acts and motives.

But nothing of this compares with the insecurity engendered
(especially if one is a scientist) when it comes to understanding that
the planet on which we travel has been involved in cosmic accidents:
even more if it seems that the plan of propagation and evolution has
made the role of such accidents of collision not incidental but a
precondition of evolutionary progress and destruction alike.

This is, in my view, the main cause of the emotional outbursts that
have followed Worlds in Collision. The idea of a great fear living in
man since the days of the great catastrophes presented itself early to
me I was a student of psychology before I became a student of history,
natural history, and folklore: and I was aware that there is some
"blocking," in the psychoanalytic sense, to see obvious things. Why
have students of mythology failed to discover why the gods of the
pantheons of all ancient races should have been identified with the
planets? Why do the traditions of all races speak of celestial
theomachy, of great natural perturbations, with the Sun, stars, and
meteors taking part? Or, why do modern students of religion not wonder
at the grandiose natural events described in the holy books and the
concepts ofeschatology so prominent in the Gospels and the Koran? Why
do students of geology strain themselves to explain, or explain away,
catastrophically-formed phenomena they observe on the bottoms of the
seas, in mountain ridges, in great fields of lava, and great deserts?

I have called this psychological phenomenon collective amnesia. and I
have explained the term elsewhere: it is not that we have no
historical evidence: it is rather the inability to read the texts as
they are--Mars for Mars, Jupiter for Jupiter, fire for fire, hurricane
for hurricane, and deluge for deluge.

To elaborate on this subject and to show how the unconscious mind
works in all areas of our activities, even in our many sporadic wars,
I have written Mankind in Amnesia. If Jung was right in his concept of
a collective unconscious mind, then its probing must reveal the
persistent racial memories of great catastrophes of the past when the
sea, the sky, and the earth competed in destruction--for we are
"survivors of survivors."

Are there no other reasons for the outcry and concerted opposition to
the reconstruction offered in Worlds in Collision? True, most scholars
have a vested interest in accepted theories. There is also a
psychological urge to reject anything contrary to what we have
learned.

But these are additional reasons; vested interests and resistance to
change one's thinking are both secondary to the great and primary
reason: the fear of the repetition of the events, grown in the racial
memory of the survivors of these crises, when the Earth was carried to
the brink of destruction. It is this hidden fear which is behind the
scientists' vehement denial of the available evidence for global
catastrophes in historical times. The same fear manifests itself in
many forms of irrational behavior--directed, above all, against anyone
whose findings threaten to bring the archaic trauma into the open.

References

1. Joseph Needham and Wang Ling, Science and Civilization in China,
Vol. Ill (1959), p. 444.
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References

1. file://localhost/www/saturnian/files/vel-unpublished/natural.htm
2. file://localhost/www/saturnian/files/vel-unpublished/index.htm
3. file://localhost/www/saturnian/files/vel-unpublished/precursors.htm
4. file://localhost/www/saturnian/files/vel-unpublished/accept.htm#f_1
5. file://localhost/www/saturnian/files/vel-unpublished/natural.htm
6. file://localhost/www/saturnian/files/vel-unpublished/index.htm
7. file://localhost/www/saturnian/files/vel-unpublished/precursors.htm