Born Moscow 1895

M. D. 1921

Psychoanalysis Tel Aviv in 30’s

Worlds in Collision (Doubleday 1950)

Earth In Upheaval (Doubleday 1955)

AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) debate with Sagan, Goldsmith, Mulholland (1974)

Honorary degree (Lethbridge, 1978)

Died 1985

Thesis:

Basic 'experimental' input is vast array of myths from many cultures. These represent the incomprehensible as seen by primitive man, and hence can be interpreted as historically accurate data. Note there is a lot of evidence that even trained observers are incapable of seeing novel phenomena for what they really are.

Secondly: many myths tell the same story: e.g., many peoples tell of magical food falling from the sky.

• Manna that sustained the Israelites,
• Morning dew in the Icelandic Eddas,
• Honey from the clouds in the Rig-Veda of the Hindus,
• Honey from the clouds in the Finnish Kalevala,
• Hera, symbolizing the Earth, was shrouded in ambrosia,
• Maori legends have two magical dews, the heavy for eating and the light for drinking.

  All these seem to be associated in the legends with times of great upheaval and darkness.

Velikovsky extracted the common features, and welded them into a history of primeval disasters.

e.g. Exodus

1. Nile turned to blood
2. Plague of frogs
3. Plague of Lice
4. Plague of flies
5. Death of Cattle
6. Plague of Boils
7. Plague of hail
8. Plague of locusts
9. Plague of darkness
10. Death of first-born

Parting of Red Sea

Provision of Manna in the desert

Pillar of cloud by day, a column of fire by night

To give one detailed example, we can take the Biblical story of Exodus.

E.g. 10 plagues of Egypt

But Velikovsky predicts much more:

Prediction	Velikovsky	Astronomy	Observation	V	A
Temperature of Venus	Hot	Same as Earth	800°C	1	0
Cooling of Venus	Still cooling	Static	Prob. static	0	0.5
Clouds of Venus	Hydrocarbons	Not known	Sulphuric acid	0	0
Atmosphere of Venus	Very thick	Earthlike	50 atmos.	1	0
Craters on moon	Formed in 1450 B.C.	Prehistoric meteors	3 billion years old	0	1
Radioactivity on moon	Strong	None	Little	0	1
Magnetism on moon	Large	None	Evidence in rocks	1	0
Jupiter's temperature	Hot	Cold	Clouds cold, Core Hot	0.5	0.5
Radio waves from Jupiter	Yes	Never thought of it!	Seen 1958	1	0
Jupiter's atmosphere	Chlorine and sulphur	?	Both present	0.5	0
Magnetic reversal	850 B.C.	No recent ones	Maybe in pottery	0	0.5
Martian atmosphere	Argon/ neon	Nitrogen, oxygen	Carbon dioxide	0	0
Total				5	3.5

it is hard to escape the conclusion that, if we are to judge a scientific theory by its results, conventional astronomy is marginally worse.

Astronomers at Harvard suppressed the publication of Worlds in Collision, by forcing Macmillan's to reject the book, with the threat that no more academic textbooks would be sent to them for publication.

"frankly, …the publication must cut me off from the Macmillan Company" Howard Shapley, Director Harvard Observatory (Jan 1950)

Rights transferred to Doubleday

"Several attempts have been made to link such a move to stop the book’s publication to ..the Harvard Observatory. This idea is utterly false" Howard Shapley (Sept 1950)

"This was not only immoral, but a blunder." Isaac Asimov.

Then why are Velikovsky's ideas unacceptable?