markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins) (03/16/88)
In article <3592@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> sethg@athena.mit.edu (Seth A. Gordon) writes: >In article <5143@uwmcsd1.UUCP> markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins) writes: >> [a heck of a lot...] >> >> (5) In the early '50's the best selling work "Worlds In Collision" was >> banned... > >Pardon? I thought the First Amendment prohibited that sort of behavior, >even in the early '50s. I don't believe the First Amendment applies to publishing, as that is a private industry. A publisher can avoid publishing anything it wants, especially when under the threat of boycott by some of its clientelle. However, the anti-trust laws may have applied in such a situation. In this particular case, MacMillian was successfully kept from publishing Worlds in Collision. Other publishers took on the book thereby overcoming the attempt to suppress it. (Was it banned because Velikovsky was a >Communist? Improbable...) No. It was because his book related to possible celestial events in the past giving Mythological evidence to support it (and geological and paleontological in the following work Earth In Upheaval). His interpretation of the evidence he collected boiled down to the assertion that Electromagnetic forces play a large role in shaping the orbits of our planets and that the solar system is electromagnetically active (something that was not accepted back in the late '40's.) In short, it was because he was going against the currently held view without using evidence INTERNAL to the field (astronomy). > >> ...by hard-nosed astronomers who knew nothing about what the >> book was talking about, by their own admission. > >WIC was, if I'm not mistaken, a book about astronomy. Are you saying it >was banned by astronomers who knew nothing about astronomy? This is true in part. Obviously, Astronomers know astronomy. However, they usually know next to nothing about geology, ancient history or mythology nor do many appreciate how one goes about gathering evidence in these fields. One would be led to ask why a person would spend twenty of thirty years of his life pursuing a task that some others considered crazy. Well, in actual fact, Velikovsky had many collaborators in the Academia (most of whom disagreed with him) who were willing to give him the background information he needed in pursuing his tasks. Einstein also collaborated with him in the latter part of his life, though not on a technical level. Primarily, the man was a Jungian psychologist. A big area of research in this field is in determining where the recurring archetypes in the mythologies of the world come from. Many held to the idea that they were genetic in origin and this was used to explain the overall similarity of the mythologies. Some people (working in mythology today) hold the view that similarities came about by dispersion ... dispersion across continents too. This would explain, for example, why the Mohawks have the legend of the Tower of Babel. Velikovsky, struck by the similarities in all the catastrophe myths of the world, came to believe that they may be garbled versions of actual historical events ... global in nature. The task, a very difficult and risky one, is to reconstruct the actual events from the whole collection of the worlds' myths. This is much like trying to rebuild a house after a tornado. The way he pursued this task was basically the way a linguist tries to reconstruct the common ancestor of a family of related languages. >Carl Sagan, in _Broca's Brain,_ has a chapter on Velikovsky's book, with >an appendix on the physics behind it. In the appendix, he says that the >probability of some of the planetary maneuvers V. describes are so >unlikely that the book should have been titled _Worlds In Collusion._ The probability argument holds no water, because it fails to take into account that the planets are moving in closed orbits. IF the orbits cross, then the probability is 100% that they will eventually collide or have a near collision, barring any perturbations that uncross the orbits. IF the orbits do not cross, then they will not collide, again barring any perturbations that change the situation. Probabilities simply do not enter the picture. Planets are not simply not projectiles traveling in straight- line paths. An example of a GOOD argument by Sagan was the one he gave in the book Scientists Confront Velikovsky to show that if Venus actually did come out of Jupiter (i.e. maybe it once rotated with a 2 hour period or something) then it would be very unlikely that it would be ejected in an elliptical orbit towards the sun. More likely, it would be ejected in some other direction possibly on an escape orbit. > >> Never mind that the very same kind of hypothesis has been >> invoked to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs. > >The dinosaur-extinction hypothesis, as I understand it, is that dust >raised by a large meteorite striking the earth caused climactic changes >that the dinosaurs couldn't survive. Velikovsky's hypothesis was that the climatic change brought about by the near collision caused the mass extinction at the end of the Ice Age ... the very same kind of hypothesis.