"When you taste, you know." (A useful axiom, in my view. If someone asks what cinnamon tastes like, your only viable option is to hand him some. Some matters simply don't
usefully reduce to words).
FWIW, one thing I've come to taste and know over the years is the truth of an observation Idries Shah made to the effect that people are only capable of so much rationality. When they try to exceed their inherent rationality limit (attempting to live up to what the self-styled "Enlightenment" ideal), their irrationality begins to remind me of Steve Martin with the arrow through his head -- as obvious to others as it is unsuspected.
Over-exuberant "rationality" imperceptibly slips into belief (preceding post). And, like Steve with the arrow, it is never apparent to the believer himself.
When Roger Bacon started the "Scientific Method" ball rolling, he passed along the Empirical approach he got from his Islamic predecessors well enough, but omitted the other half of it -- an omission that has disfigured it ever since : the necessity of periodic detachment for the sake of maintaining perspective.
From an strictly empirical-logical standpoint, meat is food, and people are meat. Considering this one in the round is so second-nature that failing to do it in others isn't noticed. But it should be.
Only through the synthesis of multiple perspectives does something approaching the truth of any matter emerge. Notice how consistently (and stridently) all varieties of fanaticism insist that their own, single perspective is
THE TRUTH, as Marxism does on the axioms of Marx. Disrupt this closed system, deny it the exclusivity it demands, and the pseudo-certainty of it evaporates.
"If the wind always blows from the same direction the trees grow crooked."
I think (having read Velikovsky with an open mind 35+ years ago, I
know) that if you would trouble yourself to become even minimally acquainted with what he "saw" concerning celestial mechanics (comets included) back in the 1950s, and came to appreciate both how astonishingly ahead of his time's paradigm he was and the nature of the shameful treatment he received at the hands of the "scientific" mafia, the single perspective on him that now suffices you would no longer satisfy you as at all adequate.
Requesting your indulgence then for five minutes of your attention :
Joshua Snyder wrote:In 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky culminated decades of research with a book titled Worlds in Collision that "proposes that many myths and traditions of ancient peoples and cultures are based on actual events." His approach was interdisciplinary, a rarity in the 20th century, taking into account astronomy, physics, chemistry, psychology, ancient history, and comparative mythology.
He noted, for example, that Venus, the second brightest object in the night sky, was not mentioned by the earliest astronomers. He proposed that the planet was a newcomer to our solar system, a comet, appearing in historical times with an irregular orbit that caused catastrophic events on our own planet.
Coming in close contact with the Earth, the latter's rotation altered, making it appear that The Sun had stood still, a phenomenon reported on in the Book of Josue. What has come to be known as Joshua's Long Day is corroborated by the texts of the ancient Chinese, Japanese, Egyptians, Babylonians, and Mayans; the East Asians reporting a extremely long sunset, the Mexicans reporting an extremely long sunrise.
Immanuel Velikovsky was too eminent a scholar to be dismissed outright as a kook, and he counted some respected people among his friends. (See The Einstein-Velikovsky Correspondence). Nevertheless, his Catastrophism was rejected outright by a scientific establishment that couldn't stomach an interdisciplinary challenge to its dogmatic Uniformitarianism, even after Velikovsky's predictions about the temperature of Venus and radio activity from Jupiter were proven true.
Prof. Stove notes the book "became the target of nearly universal abuse and derision" and "[t]he professional scientists' campaign against Worlds in Collision began well before the book appeared" and resulted in, among other things, its author being "rigorously excluded from access to learned journals for his replies," "the sacking of the Senior Editor of Macmillan responsible for accepting the Velikovsky manuscript," "the sacking of the director of the famous Hayden Planetarium in New York, because he proposed to take Velikovsky seriously enough to mount a display about the theory," and "Macmillan finally cav[ing] in, and prevailed on Velikovsky to let them transfer their best-selling property to a competitor, Doubleday, which, as it has no textbook division, is not susceptible to professorial blackmail."
Prof. Stove also "mention[s] some of the more startling pieces of evidence that have come to light since Velikovsky published." It was he who gave "altogether novel importance to electrical and magnetic forces in the solar system" and who "said that the earth must have a magnetosphere much stronger, and extending much further into space, than anyone else believed possible." He also "predict[ed] that Jupiter would be found to be a radio source, long before the astonished radio-astronomers found it so." Most interesting was what he said about the second planet:
According to Velikovsky, there were all over the world, as folklore alleges, rains of burning pitch. This, among other things, led him to assert in 1950 that the clouds of Venus must be very rich in petroleum gas. All contemporary knowledge of the chemistry of the planet's clouds was flatly against it. Yet it has turned out to be so. If you think this is a bit creepy, you have heard nothing yet.
According to Velikovsky in 1950, Venus must still be very hot, because of the circumstances of its recent birth and subsequent career. The astronomers had long "known" that it was cool, and as late as 1959 accepted estimates of its temperature, such as 59 degrees centigrade, were still being revised slightly downward. Yet it has turned out that the planet has a surface temperature around 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
This would be hard enough to reconcile with any "uniformitarian" theory which requires a common origin for all the planets. But worse was to come. For Mariner II put it beyond doubt that the rotation of Venus is retrograde — that is, while it revolves in the same direction as that in which all the other planets both revolve and rotate, it rotates in the contrary sense! No doubt ad hoc amendments will be tried, to fit this fact into conventional theories of the origin of the planets (just as desperate ad hoc amendments to a "greenhouse" theory are still being made to account for the temperature); but this one will test their ingenuity, that is certain.
Say what you will of Velikovskian cosmology, more scientists themselves are questioning whether it is right to dismiss outright celestial events as described in ancient texts, as this article suggests — The Odyssey astronomically accurate? And exciting news just today that the largest planet of our solar system "snared a passing comet in the middle of the last century, eventually releasing it 12 years later," rings a Velikovskian bell — Jupiter had temporary moon for 12 years.
Whatever conclusions one may come to on this matter, it raises interesting questions about the tyrannical conformity of thought that plagues not only the scientific but also the economic and political spheres as well. Are not proponents of the Austrian School of Economics similarly marginalized by the academic cartel, as are advocates the traditional United States non-interventionism by the political cartel? Alternative medicine's long history of suppression by the American Medical Association is also a parallel.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/snyder-joshu ... a21.1.html
In 1953 while addressing graduate students at Princeton University, Velikovsky suggested two further testable phenomena: that the Earth's magnetic field reaches as far out into space as the Moon's orbit and is responsible for the vibratory or rocking movements of the moon. And he suggested that the planet Jupiter (from which he said the Venus-comet had originated) radiates in the radio frequency range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
These predictions were taken by scientists of the 1950s as being tantamount to proof of Velikovsky's ignorance, insanity or both. Harlow Shapley refused to become involved in any experimental research to confirm his ideas. When, for instance, it was suggested that Shapley might use the Harvard observatory to search for evidence of hydrocarbons in the Venusian atmosphere. Shapley replied that he wasn't interested in Velikovsky's 'sensational claims' because they violate the laws of mechanics and 'if Dr Velikovsky is right, the rest of us are crazy'.
Within little more than a decade of publication, 'all' of Velikovsky's key predictions were confirmed by experiment. The 'Mariner' spacecraft of 1963 determined by experiment that the surface temperature of Venus is in the region of 800 degrees Fahrenheit and that the planet's fifteen-mile thick atmosphere is composed of heavy hydrocarbon molecules and possibly more complex organic compounds as well.
In April 1955, Drs. B. F. Burke and K. L. Franklin announced to the American Astronomical Society their accidental discovery of radio noise broadcast by Jupiter. In 1962, the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington and the Goldstone Tracking Station in southern California announced that radiometric observations showed Venus to have a slow retrograde motion. In the same year, the 'Explorer' satellite detected the Earth's magnetic field at a distance of at least twenty-two Earth radii, while in 1965 it was reported that the tail extends 'at least as far as the moon'. (3)
Considering that the main thrust of science's attack on Velikovsky was a personal attack on his integrity, the behavior of some of his most vociferous critics in the scientific community makes interesting reading. In August 1963, 'Harper's Magazine' which had carried the original announcement of Velikovsky's theories, now did a retrospective piece pointing out how all his main predictions had been borne out. The author of both articles, Eric Larrabee, made a reference which drew a thunderous response from Donald Menzel, director of Harvard College Observatory. At the height of the controversy a decade earlier, Menzel had tried to shoot Velikovsky down by calculating that for his astronomical theory to be right, the Sun would have to have a surface potential of 10 billion billion volts. Obviously, said Menzel, this is impossible so Velikovsky must be wrong. By an extraordinary chance, in 1960, V. A. Bailey, emeritus professor of physics at Sydney University (who knew nothing of the Velikovsky controversy) claimed to have discovered that the Sun is electrically charged and has a surface potential of 10 billion billion volts - exactly the value calculated by Menzel.
Feeling that Bailey's discovery made him look foolish, Menzel now sent off a strongly worded response to 'Harper's' and a letter to Bailey in Australia asking him to revoke his theory of the electric charge on the Sun as it was assisting the enemy. According to Ralph Juergens:
Professor Bailey, taking exception to the idea that his own work should be abandoned to accomodate the anti-Velikovsky forces, prepared an article in rebuttal to Menzel's piece and submitted it to 'Harper's' for publication in the same issue with Menzel's. Bailey had discovered a simple arithmetical error in Menzel's calculations, which invalidated his argument.
It is equally interesting to see how the Harvard astronomer dealt with the fact that most of Velikovsky's predictions had been confirmed. On the radio emissions from Jupiter, he wrote that, since most scientists do not accept Velikovsky's theory then it follows that 'any seeming verification of Velikovsky's prediction is pure chance'. As far as the high surface temperature of Venus is concerned, Menzel argued that 'hot is only a relative term'. Later in the article he referred back to this statement saying 'I have already disposed of the question of the temperature of Venus'. Actually, in 1950, Menzel had estimated the temperature of Venus to be about 120 degrees Fahrenheit when it is really more like 800 degrees. On the extent of the Earth's magnetic field, Menzel wrote that Velikovsky 'said it would extend as far as the moon; actually the field suddenly breaks off at a distance of several earth diameters'. In fact, Menzel was wrong; the field had been detected as extending at least twenty-two Earth radii a year earlier by the 'Explorer' satellite.
To their credit, a few scientists did support Velikovsky against the climate of hysteria and intimidation including Princeton's Professor H. H. Hess, who was later chairman of the National Academy of Science's space board. In 1962, Princeton physicist Valentin Bargmann and Columbia astronomer Lloyd Motz wrote a joint letter to the editor of 'Science' magazine calling attention to Velikovsky's priority in predicting Venus's high surface temperature, Jupiter's radio emissions and the great extent of the Earth's magnetosphere, but 'Science's' editor Dr Philip Abelson, was not interested in Velikovsky. Instead, he printed a letter from science fiction writer Paul Anderson satirising Velikovsky on the grounds that science fiction writers and hoaxers also made fantastic predictions that were sometimes verified. When the editor of 'Horizon' magazine wrote to Abelson protesting at the exclusion of an article by Velikovsky, Abelson replied:
Velikovsky is a controversial figure. Many of the ideas that he expressed are not accepted by serious students of earth science. Since my prejudices happen to agree with this majority, I strained my sense of fair play to accept the letter by Bargmann and Motz, and thought that the books were nicely balanced with the rejoinder of Anderson.
'Scientific American' showed that it had not moved on editorially since it ridiculed the Wright Brothers fifty years earlier. The magazine had refused to carry advertising for 'Worlds in Collision' {Forwarded by Einstein I believe} and in 1956 it carried a strongly critical article by physicist Harrison Brown."
One of the reasons for this is the fact that Velikovsky's Egyptian chronologies directly refute Biblical history. In fact he destroys the whole time or calendrical premises of most history and shows how it is based on three pillars of ignorance. Errors accepted in one branch of academics are picked up by others and the whole fiasco is a 'house of cards' with propaganda in mind. When I found his book 'Peoples of the Sea' it was in the fiction section of my local library while the other stories and theories which have been proven false over and over again, are in the reference or science sections.
http://brainmeta.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6542
