Information on Velikovsky
Elizabeth A. Anderson
I know that this may open a serious can of worms, but I need some
help.
I am familiar with the type of claims that Velikovsky made, and I
have plowed through 'Worlds', but am by no means an expert (or
all that interested, either). A member of my close family circle
has been researching on and off for years the entire 'Velikovsky
affair' and will have a book published sometime within the next
year on just how badly V was treated by the 'establishment' of
science and in particular by Sagan.
Now, I would like to make it clear that my friend is a
well-regarded and respected professor here, and not just a random
kook. He is sincere in his opinion that there was a serious
miscarriage of justice and an alignment of what he feels were
'bullying scientists' against Velikovsky. It is his contention
that V's views have merit and have been seriously misrepresented
by scientists - and he states that he has proof that Sagan in
particular lied purposefully about V and his claims.
I find it hard to accept my friend's claims, and I would
appreciate some idea of where to start looking for
counter-evidence. The contracts for the book have been signed,
and it will be published by a well-known publisher - that is, it
is not going to be a self-published special. I am not trying -
indeed, I would not ever wish to - stop the publication, but I
must have some information that will help me settle this matter
in my own mind, and if possible, I might be able to at least show
it to my friend.
Is there someone online with an interest in this who would be
willing to discuss it with me?
Thanks for your time.
Elizabeth Anderson eand...@acs.ucalgary.ca
"Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, Gods image,
but thee who destroys a goode booke, kills reason it selfe."
- Milton
Bruce Lilly
Elizabeth A. Anderson wrote:
> A member of my close family circle
> has been researching on and off for years the entire 'Velikovsky
> affair' and will have a book published sometime within the next
> year on just how badly V was treated by the 'establishment' of
> science and in particular by Sagan.
>
> Now, I would like to make it clear that my friend is a
> well-regarded and respected professor here, and not just a random
> kook. He is sincere in his opinion that there was a serious
> miscarriage of justice and an alignment of what he feels were
> 'bullying scientists' against Velikovsky. It is his contention
> that V's views have merit and have been seriously misrepresented
> by scientists - and he states that he has proof that Sagan in
> particular lied purposefully about V and his claims.
>
> I find it hard to accept my friend's claims, and I would
> appreciate some idea of where to start looking for
> counter-evidence. The contracts for the book have been signed,
> and it will be published by a well-known publisher - that is, it
> is not going to be a self-published special. I am not trying -
> indeed, I would not ever wish to - stop the publication, but I
> must have some information that will help me settle this matter
> in my own mind, and if possible, I might be able to at least show
> it to my friend.
You can find a discussion of the issues and history in Martin Gardner's
book entitled "Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science", ISBN
0-486-20394-8. Gardner devotes all of Chapter 3 to Velikovsky and
related issues (e.g. prior authors who had made claims similar to
Velikovsky's). Another source is Gardner's "The New Age, Notes of a
Fringe Watcher", ISBN 0-87975-644-6. Chapter 9 of the latter focuses
mainly on a book written by H. H. Bauer which apparently contains
criticism of those who debunked Velikovsky. Both of Gardner's books are
well-indexed and contain many references to Velikovsky in the text, as
well as references to other publications that may be of interest to you.
George Fergus
> Elizabeth A. Anderson wrote:
>
> > A member of my close family circle
> > has been researching on and off for years the entire 'Velikovsky
> > affair' and will have a book published sometime within the next
> > year on just how badly V was treated by the 'establishment' of
> > science and in particular by Sagan.
> > I find it hard to accept my friend's claims, and I would
> > appreciate some idea of where to start looking for
> > in my own mind, and if possible, I might be able to at least show
> > it to my friend.
Bruce Lilly replied:
> You can find a discussion of the issues and history in Martin Gardner's
> book entitled "Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science", ISBN
> 0-486-20394-8. Gardner devotes all of Chapter 3 to Velikovsky and
> related issues (e.g. prior authors who had made claims similar to
> Velikovsky's). Another source is Gardner's "The New Age, Notes of a
> Fringe Watcher", ISBN 0-87975-644-6. Chapter 9 of the latter focuses
> mainly on a book written by H. H. Bauer which apparently contains
> criticism of those who debunked Velikovsky. Both of Gardner's books are
> well-indexed and contain many references to Velikovsky in the text, as
> well as references to other publications that may be of interest to you.
Although this might help Elizabeth make up her mind, Martin Gardner
is considered almost as evil as Carl Sagan by the supporters of
Velikovsky, so quoting him to her friend isn't going to help.
Unfortunately, like many other developers of strange theories,
Velikovsky's approach is to scour various sources for little bits of
info that tend to support his thesis, while ignoring any info that
is not consistent with it. The result is that anyone who is not an
expert in whatever subject Velikovsky is discussing will find his
arguments convincing, whereas an expert finds them ludicrous and
not worth investigating further.
-George
Tim Thompson
Cross-posted to talk.origins, where a similar request was posted by
Elizabeth Anderson under another thread title:
"Help with Velikovsky" on July 21 1997
[Message <5r01ho$2e...@acs4.acs.ucalgary.ca> ]
The following text is posted by Tim Thompson for Leroy
Ellenberger who has no direct access to Usenet:
--------------------Begin Ellenberger----------------------------------
Having discovered Elizabeth Anderson's request for information on
Velikovsky on DejaNews, Ellenberger offers the expanded text of the
postcard sent to 135 people in January 1997:
TOP TEN REASONS WHY VELIKOVSKY IS WRONG
ABOUT WORLDS IN COLLISION
10. The "sequence of planetary orbits" that conserves angular momentum
does NOT conserve energy, creating an enormous energy surplus, far
more serious than Rose's mere "energy disposal problem," which is an
example of the _petitio principii_ fallacy (see Kronos II:4, p. 60
[and below]).
9. Orbit of Venus CANNOT circularize on Velikovsky's time scale,
regardless what Einstein allegedly said in 1955; electromagnetism is
no panacea & chaos theory cannot save the phenomenon, contrary to the
wishful thinking of Bass.
8. Circular, resonant orbits of the moons of Earth & Mars betray no
sign of recent disturbance, indicated by Velikovsky, or later capture,
as Van Flandern noted in 1979 & of which Rose is willfully ignorant.
7. Since close encounters drastically increase inclination, the small
inclinations of the orbits of Venus & Mars belie the multiple
near-collisions outlined by Velikovsky. [This point is obscured by the
2-dimensional n-body simulations that were performed on talk.origins
in 1994 while testing Grubaugh's model.]
6. The debris Venus allegedly deposited in Earth's atmosphere causing
40 years of darkness after the Exodus left no trace in the world's ice
caps or ocean bottoms, a test ignored by Rose.
5. The bristlecone pine survived the global catastrophe at 3500 BP
that Velikovsky claimed killed all trees, to which he replied [to
Ellenberger on Palm Sunday 1978] "So? They survived," indicating a
cavalier attitude toward disconfirming evidence.
4. The continuity of flora & fauna on islands such as Hawaii [first
noted by Roger Ashton at San Jose, Ca, Conf. in 1980 and later in C&C
Workshop 1986:1, p. 5] shows they were not overrun by globe-girdling
tidal waves at 3500 BP when the "Sun" stood still for Joshua, as
Velikovsky claimed, an illusion produced by a post-perihelion comet
passing *behind* Earth, as Bob Kobres explained for Phaethon; [see
<http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/phaeth.html>].
3. The year was not 360 d. between 3500 BP & 2700 BP, as Velikovsky
claimed, because at 3200 BP the Chinese reckoned the summer solstice
recurred 548 d. after the winter solstice, i.e., 365.25x1.5=547.875, a
datum smugly ignored by Rose in "From Calendars to Chronology," making
the "Velikovsky Divide" a fraud & delusion, [in D.A. Pearlman (ed.),
Stephen J. Gould and Immanuel Velikovsky (1996) wherein Rose avers "I
have always wanted revenge on the various villains of the Velikovsky
Affair, whether from 1950 or from 1965 or from 1974" (p. 702). The
book is a petty, ponderous, mean-spirited, wrong-headed, and
vindictive collaboration of Ginenthal, Wolfe, Rose, Cardona, D.N.
Talbott, & Cochrane].
2. Magellan images of Venus reveal a crust too thick to have been
molten 3500 years ago, & if the 900 large craters on Venus were so
young then Earth would be expected to have more than the <20 craters
of comparable size it does have.
[NOTE Added by Tim Thompson: Also see my article "Is the Planet Venus
Young?" http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/venus-young.html ]
1. Since Venus is too massive EVER to have had a VISIBLE tail,
cometary behavior ascribed to the DEITY Inanna-Ishtar applies NOT to
PLANET Venus, as Velikovsky & such naive epigoni as Cardona, Cochrane
& Rose claim, but to a real COMET, now defunct or absent, which was
ALSO sacred to Inanna-Ishtar, as Clube & Napier propose in The Cosmic
Winter (1990); lesson: Inanna does not necessarily refer to Venus
since she was ALSO associated with Moon, Sirius, etc. Thus, Inanna,
NOT Venus, was hailed by the Mesopotamians as "Queen of the
Zenith"[--an allusion to Sirius, a position never occupied by Venus in
the putative "polar configuration"].
0. The revised chronology fares no better because the 10th century
BCE, where Velikovsky places the XVIIIth Dynasty pharaohs coeval with
the Minoan eruption of Thera, contains no signal for this eruption [in
the Greenland ice cores].
[These reasons present a prima facie difficulty for Velikovsky's
position and support R.G.A.Dolby's arguments in S.I.S. Review I:3,
1976, 26-30 (adapted from Social Studies of Science 5, 1975, 165-175)
and implicitly refute H. Meynell's reply to Dolby in which he claimed
"...the impressiveness of Velikovsky's thesis is due as much to its
coherence within itself as to its correspondence with ascertainable
fact....that _one_ at first sight extremely improbable hypothesis,
which should be liable to falsification in any number of ways, is in
fact apparently confirmed in as many ways" (S.I.S. Review I:4, 1977,
5-8). The foregoing "Top Ten" would appear to contradict this
assessment.]
Rose says "To undermine [an] argument, we need simply identify [the]
false premisses[sic]." His false premises include (a) equating Inanna
solely with Venus, a crude, ignorant reductionism, (b) treating
religious texts as historical evidence for actual events instead of
metaphors, & (c) over-emphasizing predictive power. In Kronos II:4, he
should have said "to prove Velikovsky right you must assume Velikovsky
right" & thereby ignore all the contrary physical evidence, which has
priority over "historical" evidence which is subject to
interpretation. Since Rose denies the absolute veto power of relevant
evidence, he ignores it when he cannot pervert it. When Rose says
"Velikovsky's critics had no decent arguments against him" & Wolfe
says "there is no reason why Velikovsky...should be wrong _a priori_,"
[in Pearlman (ed.)] they merely show they, too, along with Ginenthal
are each TRULY "an ignoramous masquerading as a sage"--deluded beyond
redemption. [One of the gimmicks in Pearlman (ed.) is the classic
Velikovskian tactic of turning a critic's words against him so that at
every opportunity Henry Bauer is shown to be "an ignoramous
masquerading as a sage", as Bauer showed Velikovsky to be in Beyond
Velikovsky (1984).] Comments/questions welcome.
For a review of Ruth V. Sharon, ABA: The Life of Im. Velikovsky, see
J. Sci. Explor. 10:4, 1996, 561-569. For a copy, send $1.00 P&H & also
get a copy of V's audacious 3-31-47 letter to Shapley sent with Cosmos
w/o Gravitation (whose significance, contrary to G'thal & Rose, is
that since it shows V. did not understand physics his challenge to
science was presumptuous in the extreme), a letter curiously absent
from Stargazers & Gravediggers and Velikovskian apologetics [such as
Pearlman (ed.)].
Leroy Ellenberger, 3929A Utah Street, St. Louis, MO 63116, USA
Jan. 1997
<http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/velidelu.html>
<ftp://ftp.primenet.com/pub/lippard/>, 9 "cle-" files from 1994's
flame war with Cochrane and Talbott
---------------------------End Ellenberger---------------------------
--
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/8851/
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Timothy J. Thompson, Timothy.J...@jpl.nasa.gov
NASA/JPL Terrestrial Science Research element
Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer.
Atmospheric Corrections Team - Scientific Programmer.
Tim Thompson
Cross-posted to talk.origins, where a similar request was posted by
Elizabeth Anderson under another thread title:
"Help with Velikovsky" on July 21 1997
[Message <5r01ho$2e...@acs4.acs.ucalgary.ca> ]
The following text is posted by Tim Thompson for Leroy
Ellenberger who has no direct access to Usenet:
--------------------Begin Ellenberger----------------------------------
Recent remarks in private list groups and on Usenet regarding the
Velikovsky controversy and certain topics therein, such as the
Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, usually discussed with the example
of the mammoths, indicate to a veteran observer that many of these
latter day discussants are woefully uninformed about the true state of
the discussion or else suffer severe long-term memory loss. To
partially fill in the gap, so to speak, I reproduce below a letter
sent to many people over the years starting in September 1987 and
later distributed at the August 1990 Reconsidering Velikovsky
Conference in Toronto.
The letter was intended to clarify certain issues regarding my leaving
Kronos and to indicate the gross incompetence shown by Lynn Rose in
Kronos over his treatment of the ice cores. This charge of gross
incompetence and malfeasance was sustained overwhelmingly by Sean
Mewhinney in his "Ice Cores & Common Sense" distributed in April 1989
to 110 scholars and interested parties and then published in C&AH
XII:1 & XII:2, 1990. Additions to the original letter are shown in
brackets. In the letter, note especially Rose's total incompetence on
the issue of Velikovsky's position on the extinction of the mammoths.
C. Leroy Ellenberger
3929 Utah Street
St. Louis, MO 63116
September 1, 1987
Dear Friend,
Enclosed for your information is a collection of letters from New York
Times this year [May 16, Aug. 29] bearing on Velikovsky plus a copy of
my letter from Skeptical Inquirer last summer, "A lesson from
Velikovsky", [and Nature 1 Aug. 95, 10 Oct. 85, 21 Nov. 85, 9 Jan. 86].
On the subject of the ice cores and catastrophism, I would like you to
know that Prof. Rose's writing on this topic in Kronos has not made
one valid criticsm on a substantive point either of my writing or of
the ice core methodology. On the contrary, Prof. Rose continually
distorts and misrepresents the literature at least as flagrantly as
SAgan was accused of doing to Velikovsky [as Sean mewhinney makes
crystal clear in "Ice Cores & Common Sense" in C&AH XII:1 & XII:2,
1990].
The fact that part of the Dye 3 core is fractured in no way detracts
from the ability to date the ice and identify acidity from eruptions,
as Prof. Rose insists. The ice is cracked, but the peices were kept
together when extracted. The core did not shatter apart as the Camp
Century core did. [The new GRIP and GISP cores confirm the Dye 3
record for Holocene climate change. In fact, proxy climate records
from all over the world confirm the dating and global nature of the
Younger Dryas Klimasturz. It was quite disingenuous, if not outright
dishonest, for Rose to criticize the handling of the Dye 3 core on the
basis of reports from the Camp Century core and earlier.]
Acidity can be measured continuously, contrary to Prof. Rose. When
cracks prevent conductivity measurements on the solid ice, the acidity
is measured on small successive melted samples.
The ice core reserach is not contaminated by uniformitarian expectat-
tions, either. Significant amounts of dirt in the ice would be visible
and it is not seen (except for one yellow dust layer at c. 175 A.D.).
If anything were there, it would be detected in the normal course of
analyzing the 67,000 smaples for microparticles and if a comparatively
large amount of dirt were found, its composition would be determined.
Prof. Rose is totally off the mark on this point. And the fact that
his consultation with ice core researcher C.C. Langway at SUNY-Buffalo
is not reflected in hs writing [as of 1987] is a measure of Prof.
Rose's apparently congenital inability to process data [that
contradicts his preconceived Velikovskian notions] objectively. These
are just three of Prof. Rose's egregious distortions.
If Velikovsky's catastrophes occurred, a visible layer of dirt should
exist in the ice cores, a counterpart to the Worzel ask that
Velikovsky erroneously believed was worldwide and cometary [as
explained in "Worzel Ash" Kronos X:1]. Even if the initial influx were
washed away, the debris would have taken years to fall from the sky
and this later material would be in the ice. It is not there. And if a
flood washed the ice clean, such an inundation, distinct from seasonal
melting, would be apparent in the appearance of the ice, and such a
marker is not present.
The ice cores are a crucial test for Velikovsky's t heories which they
fail in every way. I am incredulous at the was Prof. Rose is reacting
to the ice cores. In 1980 at the Princeton Seminar, Prof. Rose allowed
that Velikovsky "either showed that these collisions happened or he
did not and we ought to be able to investigate that sort of question
on the basis of the evidence." But like so many dogged defenders of
dogma, Prof. Rose [and more recently C. Ginenthal] either denies the
evidence or distorts it to suit his purposes.
In his letter rejected by Nature and then printed in Kronos [XII:1],
Prof. Rose even denies that Worlds in Collision deals wiht wholesale
extinction of species, thereby jettisoning the Pleistocene
extinctions, including the mammoths.* This is not honest scholarship
but mindless
---------
*[In Kronos XII:1, p. 53, Rose writes: "...[T]here do not seem to have
been any wholesale extinctions connected with the latter events" i.e.,
those at 3500 B.P. Were the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions at
retail? Rose seems to forget that Velikovsky had mammoth extinction
with Worlds in Collision; see Prologue, Ch. 2, Sec. "The Mammoths". In
EArth in Upheaval, Ch. X, p. 169, we read "There is no proper way out
of this dilemma, other than the assumption that now extinct animals
still existed in historical times and that the catastrophe which
overwhelmed man and animals and annihilated numerous species
[wholesale(?)] occurred in the second or first millennium before the
present era." Could it be that Rose is not familiar with the contents
of the very chapter he cites on p. 53 of Kronos XII:1?]
---------
revisionism of the worst sort. Nobody can change what Velikovsky
wrote, not even Perfesser Rose. Can we not even agree on this?
Furthermore, contrary to Perfesser Rose's insistence, the Venus
Tablets do not "strongly support" Worlds in Collision. They are merely
consistent with the final stage of orbital scenarios implicit in the
book. They do not strongly support Velikovsky because the small
eccentricity difference [Rose and Vaughan claim] they imply is a far
cry from intersecting planetary orbits, the hallmark of Worlds in
Collision
[and see my "Ignotum per Ignotius" in Aeon 3:1 for more on the Venus
Tablets].
Because I choose not to be associated with the likes of the philosophy
professor cum solipsist resident on Balls Pond Road** in Buffalo, I
---------
**The Ballspond-Road fallacy is the claim that everyone is entitled to
his own opinion; but not when the opinion is unambiguously wrong, as
in believing the Moon is made of green cheese. See New Scientist
7-7-83, p. 51, and 5-19-90. p. 72.
---------
resigned from Kronos last December when I read in XII:1 Perfesser
Rose's unrefereed diatribe on ice cores. I remember when it was apoint
of pride that papers in Kronos were refereed, albeit with uneven and
sometimes even uninformed expertise. Sic transit gloria. In any event,
there is simly no excuse for Perfesser Rose's uninformed prejudices to
be printed with somany flagrant and incontestable mistakes. [In
contrast, my "Still Facing Many Problems" in Kronos X:1 was vetted
prior to submission by Sr. Ed. David Griffard and several other
outside referees. It was no pure vanity piece as Rose's was.]
My letter in Kronos XII:2 on Michelson shows that Perfesser Rose is
out of his depth discussing physics. Indeed, none of his substantive
criticisms of my writing in XI:2 makes a valid point.
In lending credence to deGrazia's notion that a dirt layer might
migrate down through solid ice, Perfesser Rose shows he truly is
incompetent in physics. If anyone doubts that dirt stays put in a
glacier, they should visit the Quelccaya Ice Cap in Peru's Andes,
pictured on p. 102 of 1/87 Nat'l. Geographic, and watch the action.***
---------
***I would also point out that in XII:2, the acid signal that Rose is
about 4000 BC is really the Thera signal at 1645 BC. Evidently, Rose
did a naive linear interpolation on depth for dating a signal at 1200
m depth between end points of (50 BC, 800 m) and (10,000 BC, 1800 m)
which implicitly ignores thinning w/depth.
---------
Keep in mind, having an open mind is not a condition meant to be
permanent. As G.K. Chesterton observed, "...the object of opening the
mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."
Not one topic related to Velikovsky that I chose to investigate turned
out to be anything close to what Velikovsky represented it to be as
I've shown in my recent writing in Kronos. To some, the mere survival
of the bristlecone poines is a total refutation of Worlds in
Collision. Most of my invited, published writing defending Velikovsky
(Astronomy, BAR, & Frontiers of Science) were written after my first
doubts (when Slabinski refuted Warlow on tippe top Earth). But I
persisted as long as I thought there was someting worth defending. I
was overly generous and too profoundly uninformed to know better until
the negative evidence became overwhelming.
I was able to reationalize the ice cores from 8/77 to 12/82, until the
Dye 3 results were announced in Science; but Dolby's case**** in 1977
---------
****Available from me upon request. I sent it to Greenberg in 1977 and
to Rose in 1983, [who then never cited it]. With this letter having
been sent to over 180 people since 1987, no one asked for it.
---------
was a sufficient falsification in retrospect. In testing Velikovsky's
ideas, as opposed to obdurate denial of reality, I have paid my
respects to Velikovsky's claim to scientific consideration. It would
be encouraging if others could be as forthright in facing the cruel
truth that is obvious to anyone who will but look. I am very tired of
Velikovskian debate that too often becomes a dreadfully weary exercise
in pompous tendentiousness, a form honed to near perfection by
Perfesser
Rose [and now to perfection by C. Ginenthal and I. Wolfe]. In honest
scientific discussions, the data swamp prior beliefs. Unfortunately
for too many supporters of Velikovsky, no amount of data is sufficient
to do this. Neither do the ice cores lie, nor is their message so
inscrutable as to require the bizarre decoding that Perfesser Rose has
hinted he will reveal in the pages of Kronos; [see Aeon 3:1 for this
revelation.
My rebuttal to Rose, prepared for Aeon 3:2, was cancelled by Cochrane
while it reading via tape recording, which was on the program for the
Nov. 1991 CSIS meeting in Haliburton, Ont., was deleted for lack of
interest. This "Litmus Tests in the Ice" is available from me for
$1.00 postage & handling.] But for some, no gumtree istoo high to
climb! And Shapley had no monopoly on intellectual dishonesty.
Sincerely yours
(signed)
Leroy Ellenberger
Leroy Ellenberger, Formerly Sr. Ed. & Exec. Secy., Kronos and
Confidant to Velikovsky, 4/78--11/79; vivere est vincere.
3929A Utah Street, St. Louis, MO 63116, USA
<http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/velidelu.html>
<ftp://ftp.primenet.com/pub/lippard/>, contains 9 "cle-" files; see
"cle-contra-cochrane" for more on Rose's intellectual and scientific
malfeasance; treatments of Ginenthal's writing in "cle-talbott" and
"cle-ginenthal-factor"
<c.l...@rocketmail.com>
Mundus vult decipi ergo decipiatur.
Tim Thompson
On August 14 I posted a message for Ellenberger on the "top ten
reasons why Velikovsky was wrong about Worlds in Collision"
[message ID <5t03ts$j...@netline.jpl.nasa.gov> dated 08/14/97
subject "Information on Velikovsky"]. Conway posted a reply
attached to another message [message ID <EGBI6...@scn.org>
dated 09/10/97 subject "Help with Velikovsky". This reply is
from Ellenberger, and deals only with his portion of Conway's
09/10 post. Ellenberger has no direct access to the newsgroup
posting; his response comes somewhat later than normal as I
did not forward a copy of the message that Conway had E-mailed
to me.
-----------------BEGIN ELLENBERGER---------------------
Ellenberger's Reply to Conway
On 10 Sep 97, in reply to my "Top Ten Reasons Why Velikovsky
Is Wrong about Worlds in Collision" (posted by Tim Thompson),
James Conway took exception to three points. All that he shows,
however, is that he is a pedant who does not understand the
implications of what Velikovsky wrote, i.e., that he, Conway,
does not read for meaning. In this infirmity he is in the good
company of many other un-thinking defenders of Velikovsky,
including such distinguished polemicists (in no particular order)
as Charles Ginenthal, Lynn Rose, Ted Holden, Ev Cochrane, Ian
Tresman, C.J. Ransom, Vine Deloria, Jr., Floyd Meyer, Pete
Stapleton, Gerry Palo, John Godowski, Jim McCanney, Walter "Alter"
Radtke, and Earl Milton.
Item No. One: Mr. Conway says "Velikovsky never claimed _all_
trees were killed..." in the global catastrophe at 3500 BP.
Possibly he has not read _Earth in Upheaval_ where Velikovsky
wrote: "The oldest trees on record are [redwoods]...the most
ancient started life [c.1300 B.C.]...Thus it appears that no tree
has survived...the great [WiC] catastrophe [c. 1500 B.C.]...global
catastrophe...hurricane and tidal wave....a sunless world...for
many years" (Dell ed., p. 167). How does Mr. Conway propose trees
survived the 40 years of darkness after the Exodus that Velikovsky
believed happened? When Velikovsky was challenged on this point on
Palm Sunday 1978, he did not deny it; he replied "So? They survived."
Item No. Two: Mr. Conway doubts the year was 365.25 days between
3500 BP & 2700 BP. Evidently he is not familiar with the Chinese
calendrics collected by Joseph Needham in _Science and Civilization
in China_. Similarly, he seems to be oblivious to the fact (told
me by Sean Mewhinney in 1990, which I verified) that every ancient
statement about the number of full moons in so many days computes
to close agreement with the present 29.53 days per synodic month, a
datum evidently lost on Lynn Rose in his hand-wringing over the
possible significance of certain problems with Egyptian lunar dates.
This constant synodic month strongly suggests the absence of
Velikovskian spin and orbital disruptions. Finally, Mr. Conway
naively assumes that a calendar year necessarily corresponds to a
real astronomical period. But a 360 day year is a numerologically
pleasing compromise between a 365 day solar year and a 354 day lunar
year. Furthermore, some cultures, indeed, divided the year into 360
equal parts, with each part explicitly longer than a day.
Item No. Three: Mr. Conway totally misses the point regarding
Velikovsky's implicit dating for the Minoan eruption of Thera to
the 10th century B.C.E. It has nothing to do with some text
reporting a storm in a certain year of some pharaoh's reign, as
Mr. Conway assumes. The Minoan eruption of Thera sealed XVIIIth
Dynasty artifacts from pharaohs dated by Velikovsky to the 10th
century B.C.E.; but no major volcanic eruption is known to have
occurred then. Q.E.D. That Eddie Schorr, writing as Israel M.
Isaacson, first noted the 10th century problem in Kronos I:2, 1975,
is a fact seemingly lost on Mr. Conway.
Mr. Conway may well have many points of disagreement with Velikovsky,
as his closing remark indicates; but he made a poor choice to agree
with Velikovsky on these three points. To this extent he joins
David N. Talbott who in July 1994 was also "Hoist, Clueless, &
'Nihilated" <ftp://ftp.primenet.com/pub/lippard/cle-talbott>.
* * * SPECIAL OFFER * * *
For a copy of the critical tour de force
"Freudian Astronomy or Do Planets, Orbits, Bristlecone
Pines, & Velikovsky's Believers Suffer from Collective
Amnesia?" by Dennis Rawlins (c. 7300 words)--
a stinging analysis of Worlds in Collision that had too much of an
edge for The Zetetic in 1976 and Zetetic Scholar in 1979 and was
later spurned by Kronos, send $2.00 for copying and postage to
Leroy Ellenberger, 3929A Utah Street, St. Louis, MO 63116, USA.
<c.l...@rocketmail.com> 25 September 1997 "vivere est vincere"
<http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/velidelu.html> (now with links galore)
<http://wheel.ucdavis.edu/~btcarrol/skeptic/velikov.html> (see
"reader comments" at end)
"mundus vult decipi ergo decipiatur"
--------------------End Ellenberger------------------------------------