Ever Since Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould

Author:Stephen Jay Gould
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

19 | Velikovsky in Collision

NOT LONG AGO, Venus emerged from Jupiter, like Athena from the brow of Zeus—literally! It then assumed the form and orbit of a comet. In 1500 B.C., at the time of the Jewish exodus from Egypt, the earth passed twice through Venus’s tail, bringing both blessings and chaos; manna from heaven (or rather from hydrocarbons of a cometary tail) and the bloody rivers of the Mosaic plagues (iron from the same tail). Continuing its erratic course. Venus collided with (or nearly brushed) Mars, lost its tail, and hurtled to its present orbit. Mars then left its regular position and almost collided with the earth in about 700 B.C. So great were the terrors of these times, and so ardent our collective desire to forget them, that they have been erased from our conscious minds. Yet they lurk in our inherited and unconscious memory, causing fear, neurosis, aggression, and their social manifestations as war.

This may sound like the script of a very poor, late-late movie on TV; nonetheless, it represents the serious theory of Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision. And Velikovsky is neither crank nor charlatan—although to state my opinion and to quote one of my colleagues, he is at least gloriously wrong.

Worlds in Collision, published twenty-five years ago, continues to engender intense debate. It also has spawned a series of issues peripheral to the purely scientific arguments. Velikovsky was surely ill treated by certain academics who sought to suppress the publication of his work. But a man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right. The scientific and sociological issues are separate. And then, times and the treatment of heretics have changed. Bruno was burned to death; Galileo, after viewing the instruments of torture, languished under house arrest. Velikovsky won both publicity and royalties. Torquemada was evil; Velikovsky’s academic enemies, merely foolish.

As startling as his specific claims may be, I am more interested in Velikovsky’s unorthodox method of inquiry and physical theory. He begins with the working hypothesis that all stories reported as direct observation in the ancient chronicles are strictly true—if the Bible reports that the sun stood still, then it did (as the tug of Venus briefly halted the earth’s rotation). He then attempts to find some physical explanation, however bizarre, that would render all these stories both mutually consistent and true. Most scientists would do exactly the opposite in using the limits of physical possibility to judge which of the ancient legends might be literally accurate. (I devoted essay 17 to the last important scientific work that used Velikovsky’s method—Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth, first published in the 1680s.) Secondly, Velikovsky is well aware that the laws of Newton’s universe, where forces of gravitation rule the motion of large objects, will not allow planets to wander. Thus, he proposes a fundamentally new physics of electromagnetic forces for large bodies. In short, Velikovsky would rebuild the science of celestial mechanics to save the literal accuracy of ancient legends.

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