Velikovsky nut butter (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, October 28, 2012, 19:14 (4410 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: If Velikovsky were alive today, he himself would certainly be revising many of his own theories. But that does not invalidate his integrity, his claims to sanity, or those ideas which have borne fruit despite the scorn poured on him by the scientific establishment.-DAVID: Do you know where he got the idea of a wandering Venus from? I don't.-Clearly you are one of many who have dismissed Velikovsky as a nut without even having read his work! Most people know the story of Minerva springing from the head of Jupiter. Velikovsky discovered (initially, I think, by accident) that this Roman (and Greek) myth had many counterparts in other mythologies. This sparked the idea that such myths, instead of merely being fanciful tales, might have been passed down through the generations as fictionalized accounts of real events. He did a prodigious amount of research, not only into world mythology but also into ancient history and cosmology (including the Bible). The more he studied, the more he became convinced that Venus had broken off from Jupiter (I think as a result of a massive collision), had initially formed a comet, and only in more recent times had settled into orbit as a planet. On at least two occasions in its life as a comet, and in the course of human history, it had come close to Earth and caused havoc.
 
I really can't go into more detail than this about the Venus theory ... which of course is only part of his work ... as it's many years since I read Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval (in which he presents geological and paleontological evidence), but I know that his championship of catastrophism as opposed to the then orthodox uniformitarianism created massive hostility in the scientific establishment, which not only vilified him but also attempted to suppress his writings. As was mentioned in the Luther Sunderland book, many of his predictions turned out to be correct, but the establishment still dismisses them as lucky guesses or as ideas that had already been mooted. A book published this year by Laird Scranton, entitled The Velikovsky Heresies, apparently gives a balanced account. On one of the Amazon sites I found an extremely helpful review by someone calling himself SmokeNMirrors:-"The analysis is even-handed and open-minded and presents the pros and cons of both sides of the question, and ultimately arrives at the conclusion that those detractors who insist that Velikovsky's theory has been disproven are not being completely honest. The author concludes, based on the following points, that Velikovsky's thesis is still theoretically possible in the second decade of the twenty-first century despite the efforts of detractors (the vast majority of whom have never read a single word Velikovsky actually wrote) both inside and outside the world of academia." -He goes on to list many of the recent scientific discoveries that would seem to support Velikovsky's theories. (The parenthesis is his, not mine!)