Kicking the Sacred Cow

by James P. Hogan

  If such events indeed happened, they would be expected to have left evidence discernible today. Velikovsky offered a number of suggestions for findings that would support his theory, many of them going against the prevailing scientific beliefs of the times. One was that close encounters between the Earth and bodies the size of Venus and Mars would also have major effects on the Moon. (The lunar deity is also involved in the mythological scenarios of all cultures, usually in some kind of amorous entanglement or rivalry with the other gods.) Hence, the Moon's craters and other surface features should be relatively young—in the order of thousands of years, not billions. It should show evidence of recent heating, possibly with some remnant volcanic activity still detectable, and exhibit magnetic effects impressed into its rocks.

  Similarly with Mars. Mars has a mass of around a tenth that of the Earth and a radius slightly over a half, whereas Venus is only slightly smaller than Earth. Tidal effects of a larger body upon a smaller one will be immensely greater than those of a small body on a larger one. Therefore Mars would be a devastated planet, its surface scarred by rifts and fissures. This suggestion was put forward at a time when the possibility of life on Mars was still being vigorously debated by many scientists, and some believed that the "canals" might be the legacy of a lost civilization. It also seemed probable that a small body like Mars would lose a portion of its atmosphere in encounters with Earth. Since oxygen and water vapor are not present in the Martian atmosphere, Velikovsky reasoned that some other elements of the terrestrial atmosphere should be found there. He urged that a search be made for argon and neon. 93

  As for Venus itself, the mainstream view propounded in 1950 held it to be an Earthlike sister planet, probably somewhat warmer than Earth on account of its closer position to the Sun. Some astronomers predicted that its clouds would turn out to be water vapor and its surface covered by oceans. This was despite infrared and spectroscopic data available at that time that indicated a higher temperature and complete absence of water, but which were largely discounted because the current theory had no explanation for them. Further, although indications were that Venus's rotation about its axis was very slow, there was no difference between the radiated temperatures of the dark and light sides, which seemed anomalous. For Velikovsky there was no contradiction. Because of its violent expulsion from Jupiter and recent history as an incandescent object, it would be innately very hot, swamping any day-night effect due to the Sun.

  Velikovsky also reasoned that the bulk of the Venusian cometary tail would have been derived from the atmosphere of Jupiter and hence have contained large amounts of hydrocarbons, much of which fell upon the Earth. Hydrocarbons and other carbon derivatives should therefore be abundant in Venus's atmosphere today and contribute to its high reflective brightness. If oxygen exists in any significant amount, conceivably obtained via gas exchange with the Earth, hydrocarbon fires could still be burning on the surface.

  Since petroleum hydrocarbons were universally attributed to organic origins, Velikovsky speculated that life might exist on Jupiter, and that its transportation in some form that could survive might account for the "vermin" that came with the other Egyptian plagues. While acknowledging that the heat and general conditions were in themselves sufficient to produce proliferations of things like frogs and locusts, he thought it possible that the plague of flies could have come as larvae, known to be capable of surviving extremes of temperature and the absence of oxygen. The suggestion of life first arriving here in some preserved larval or microbial form has been put forward since from other quarters too. 94 (Personally, I think that the rivers full of dead fish, along with all the animal and human corpses from everything else that was going on provide a ready explanation for flies and the like.)

  Jupiter's Great Red Spot, Velikovsky suggested, would be a structural scar marking the place where Venus erupted, still giving rise to atmospheric perturbations. And in a lecture at Princeton in 1953 he proposed that contrary to the prevailing view of Jupiter's being cold and dead, it should be emitting nonthermal radio energy. His reason for supposing this was that if electrical forces played a role in planetary dynamics, and the Solar System as a whole was neutral, the Sun and planets would have opposite charges. Jupiter would have the largest planetary charge, and its rapid rotation should radiate electromagnetically. He had asked Einstein, with whom he maintained friendship, to use his influence to have a radio survey performed to look for such an effect. In the same talk, Velikovsky suggested that while the Earth's magnetic field was known to decrease with distance at lower altitudes, it could be stronger beyond the ionosphere and extend at least as far as the Moon—again violating currently held opinions.

  Science in Convulsion:

  The Reactions

  I always think it's pathetic when writers resort to phrases like "Words cannot describe . . ." It's the writer's job, after all, to find words that do describe. But the reaction of the scientific community to Worlds in Collision came pretty close. "Vituperative," "vitriolic," "hysterical," "irrational" jostle for consideration. Critics vied with each other in the shrillness of their denunciations.

  Word of the impending release by the Macmillan Company had circulated in the publishing trade, and a preview article entitled "The Day the Sun Stood Still" appeared in the in January 1950 issue of Harpers, which sold out in a few days. The following month, Readers Digest featured a popularization that interpreted Velikovsky as proving the assertions of the Old Testament scientifically. Velikovsky had also contracted with Collier's Magazine to produce what he understood would be a three-part serialization, but the manuscripts that he received for approval were condensations, and so sensationalized without examination of the scholarship behind the work that he threatened public disavowal unless they were severely revised. Eventually the first two appeared; the third was abandoned.

  On the strength of these articles, the storm from the academic and scientific camp, and the media who sought their opinions, began. The Dallas News thought Worlds In Collision was a Russian propaganda ploy. The Communist press saw it as a sure sign of the dying of bourgeois society. One British intellectual felt it was a move by U.S. warmongers to soften the world up for the atomic war they were preparing to launch. Any suggestion that there could anything worthwhile to learn from prescientific texts that talked about gods and dragons was an anathema, never mind—horror of horrors—quoting the Bible! (even though Velikovsky used it purely as a historical record, and then only when it was corroborated by other sources). The work, the chorus insisted, was spurious, uninformed, and utterly without scientific merit.

  Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard College Observatory, wrote twice to Macmillan, expressing astonishment that they would consider venturing into the "Black Arts," threatening to cut of all relations with the company (Macmillan owned a substantial and profitable textbook division), and insinuating that their reputation might be severely damaged if they went ahead. The February 25 issue of Science News Letter, a publication directed by Shapley, printed a condemnation of Worlds in Collision by authorities in the fields of archeology, oriental studies, anthropology, and geology, as well as astronomy—the last topic spoken for by Shapley himself. The book was only then going to press, so not one of the critics had actually seen it. Somewhat taken aback, the president of the Macmillan Company submitted the manuscript to three independent arbiters and decided to abide by their recommendation. Their vote was to go ahead with publication, and the book was released on schedule in April. Although the names of the arbiters were never officially disclosed, one of them later identified himself as the chairman of the Department of Physics at New York University and confirmed that he had voted in favor.

  Meanwhile, the attacks had intensified, spurred by an article in the Reporter written by Shapley's associate at Harvard, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, based on the January Harpers article and circulated to scientists, science editors, and publishers. It insisted, essentially, that electromagnetic phenomena can have no effect in space, whe
re processes are purely mechanical, and the events described in Worlds in Collision were impossible. The gist of this was cited in the March 25 issue of Science News Letter as a "Retort to Velikovsky," who as yet had not been heard from.

  Gordon Atwater, curator of the Hayden Planetarium and chairman of the Department of Astronomy of the American Museum of Natural History, had read the manuscript and recommended publication before the original Macmillan contract was signed. When he received a letter from Otto Struve, director of the Yerkes Observatory, requesting that he change his position, he failed to appreciate the situation and replied that while he didn't accept all of Velikovsky's claims, he felt the work had merit. Accordingly, he was preparing a favorable review of the book for This Week magazine and planning a program at the planetarium depicting the events that it described. A week later, Atwater was summarily fired from both his positions and instructed to vacate his office immediately. Attempts were also made to suppress his review in the April 2 issue of This Week, but failed. However, the credentials that appeared alongside his name, above an article pleading for open-mindedness in evaluating the new theory, were already history.

  An intended review in the New York Herald Tribune, also scheduled for April 2, was pulled, and instead readers found a denunciation by Struve with a reference to Payne-Gaposchkin stating that observations of Venus extended back at least five hundred years before the Exodus, "thus refuting the absurd idea that a comet had turned into a planet." But Velikovsky had given no date for the ejection of Venus by Jupiter, saying only that it had occurred at some earlier time. And as Velikovsky had pointed out in his book, the Babylonian tablets cited by Gaposchkin ("Venus Tables of Ammizaduga") describe Venus as exhibiting erratic motions that have baffled translators and astronomical commentators ever since their discovery. So even if the tablets do date from early in the second millennium b.c., what they show is that Venus was moving enigmatically at that time, in a way quite unlike a planet. This was a preview of the kind of distortion that was to become typical. The New York Times Book Review, again April 2, followed Gaposchkin in accusing Velikovsky of ignoring or suppressing the Ammizaduga tablets completely. But they couldn't have reviewed it very carefully. Velikovsky devotes over four pages to the tablets, quoting the complete texts for observations from five successive years and discussing the opinions of seven orientalists and astronomers who had studied them. 95

  In the following months, astronomers descended from their telescopes in droves to put down the heresy. Newspapers across the country were bombarded with abusive letters, frequently syndicated to achieve better coverage. Ignoring Velikovsky's suggestion that tilting the axis of a rotating body could produce the visual effect of an arrested or even retrogressing Sun, the director of one observatory castigated him for not being bothered by "the elementary fact that if the earth were stopped, inertia would cause Joshua and his companions to fly off into space at a speed of nine hundred miles an hour" (also brought up by Gaposchkin). But the argument is disingenuous. Even if Velikovsky is read as conceding that the Earth stopped, he makes no mention of the rate at which it decelerated. If the Earth under present conditions were to halt its rotation totally in six hours, the deceleration experienced at the equator would be the same as a car traveling at sixty miles per hour taking twenty minutes to stop. Stopping the car in an easy span of thirty seconds would be equivalent to halting the Earth in a cool 8.7 minutes—not enough to strain a seat belt, never mind throw people off the planet.

  Nevertheless, many writers and reviewers were enthusiastic, as, evidently, was the general public, for Worlds in Collision topped the bestsellers list for twenty successive weeks. But letters continued to come in to Macmillan from scientists demanding that they cease publishing the book, and some large institutions were refusing to see Macmillan salesmen. One astronomer dismissed the book as nothing but lies, on the same page declaring that he had not read and never would read it. Macmillan backed down and persuaded Velikovsky to accept a deal they had worked out to transfer the rights to Doubleday, who had no textbook division and were immune to pressure and blackmail in that direction. All remaining copies of the Macmillan edition were burned, and the editor who had accepted the book was fired after twenty-five years with the company.

  The campaign continued. Gaposchkin attacked Velikovsky again in the June 1950 issue of Popular Astronomy, the essence of the argument being that his claims couldn't be true because they violated undemonstrable dogmatisms that antedated him and therefore took precedence. In an article in Isis that was widely reproduced and circulated, Professor Otto Neugebauer of Brown University, a specialist in Babylonian and Greek astronomy, accused Velikovsky of altering quoted source material to suit his case—specifically, that he had changed a figure of 3º 13' to 33º 13'. When Velikovsky protested to the editor that his figure was correct and that the 33º 13' figure was Neugebauer's substitution, not his, the professor dismissed the incident as "simply a misprint of no concern." 96

  But it didn't change his fundamental position, which was that since Babylonian astronomical tables from before the seventh century b.c. cannot be reconciled with the celestial motions seen today, they must have been compiled in disregard for actual observations. In other words, the people who not only understood the number systems and astronomical procedures that we still use today, but who developed them, couldn't have seen what they say they saw because it contradicts what boils down to faith in a dogma.

  There were some sympathetic voices, to be sure, such as Walter Adams, director of the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories, who complimented Velikovsky on the accuracy of his astronomical material although not agreeing with all of it; Professor Lloyd Motz, astronomer at Columbia University, who was interested in the new proposals for celestial mechanics; and S. K. Vsekhsviatsky, director of Kiev University, who corresponded extensively and cited Velikovsky in support of his own views. But in the main the general pattern continued of critics repeating the same worn fallacies, citing misquotes of their own making, and academic journals publishing attacks on Velikovsky's person but not his arguments, and then refusing him space to respond. This systematic disinformation left the majority of scientists with the impression that Velikovsky had been demolished by those who knew better, and that no answers existed to the only version of the debate that they were permitted to hear.

  As noted earlier, the first volume of Velikovsky's revisions to ancient history, Ages in Chaos, followed in 1952, this time producing what the Herald Tribune described as "howls of anguish" among historians. The scientific press did not devote as much space to analyzing this work, but a measure of the criticism and its quality can be gained from one example, where the only fault that one professor could allege was that Velikovsky had mistaken the cuneiform plural sign mesh for the name of the Moabite king, Mesha. However, Velikovsky twice calls attention to the fact that in several instances the normal reading cannot apply, since the grammatical construction definitely alludes to an individual. Further commentators repeated the professor's erroneous claim, inviting the suspicion that they had read the critics but not the actual work that they purported to review.

  One person who did take notice of Velikovsky's theories was Einstein. According to his secretary, Helen Dukas, just before his death in 1955 he intended writing a letter to the curator of the Egyptology Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to request carbon-14 dating tests to check some of the theses presented in Ages in Chaos. Velikovsky had been trying for years to persuade the British Museum and other institutions to test relics from the New Kingdom and late period, which in conventional chronology spans some twelve hundred years. Generally, such items tended to be omitted from testing programs because they were notorious for being "contaminated" and yielding unacceptably low ages. When Einstein died, a copy of Worlds in Collision was found open on his desk.

  Testimony from the Rocks:

  Earth in Upheaval

  A line that some critics of Worlds in Collision had been harping on was that if
events as violent as those Velikovsky described had really happened in recent times, they would have left unmistakable signs all over the surface of the Earth. Either the critics hadn't heard of Cuvier, or they had forgotten him. In November 1955, Velikovsky obliged them with the publication of Earth in Upheaval, a testimony drawn not from myth or anything created by the minds of Man, but written into the rocks of the planet itself. In it, he examined the then-unquestioned principle of Lyellian gradualism, and contrasted its tenets with what is actually found the world over, testifying to immense cataclysms that changed the face of the Earth.

  The Fossil Graveyards

  From Alaska to Florida, Europe to Far Eastern Asia, huge graveyards are found, containing the remains of millions of animals, many types abundant and well adapted until recent times, but now extinct. They didn't die out gradually but were overwhelmed suddenly and violently across whole regions, along with entire forests that were uprooted and splintered. The fast-frozen mammoths with pieces of their last meal still preserved between their teeth that most people today have heard about represent just a tiny part of the picture. Off the north coasts of Siberia are islands hundreds of feet high that consist of practically nothing but heaped up bones and tusks of mammoths, elephants, rhinoceroses, and smashed trees. Fissures, caves, and excavations across the British Isles, France, Switzerland, and Gibraltar yield elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, lions, tigers, bears, wolves, hyenas, and others that the perplexed archeologists of earlier times could only guess had been brought by the Romans. But the numbers were too vast for that to be credible. In many instances the types were already extinct by the time of the Romans; others were later found spread across parts of Europe that they were just as foreign to, but which the Romans had never occupied. Whales somehow found their way to lodgements 500 feet above sea level in Michigan, Vermont, and Quebec.