:shrug:
Okeedokee, AnotherHeretic.
I, for one, concede all your points. You’re right, completely, top to bottom.
Enjoy.
Every morning I get up and drink a cup of coffee, then the sun rises. Therefore, my drinking coffee causes the sun to rise, right?
Seriously, if the example given above happened I’d be really careful about ingesting sugar pills, but it’s not proof in a formal logic sense of the word.
AnotherHeretic wrote:
From what I can tell, Leroy Ellenberger is the only non-Velikovskian who feels that Sagan’s Scientists Confront Velikovsky is a “pathetic” attempt at debunking, or a “hatchet job” (as you’ve referred to Sagan’s anti-Velikovsky work elsewhere). Ellenberger seems to base this on the assertions that (A) some of Sagan’s work attacks straw-man red herrings such as the story of manna not falling from the heavens on the Sabbath, (B) Sagan made some errors in his calculations such as listing Jupiter’s escape velocity as 70 km/s instead of 60 km/s, and © Sagan’s critique contained no celestial mechanics, which is a strange assertion considering that the escape velocity of Jupiter definitely qualifies as celestial mechanics.
This paints a picture of Sagan’s Scientists Confront Velikovsky as having little nit-picky errors in it here and there. It does NOT seem, to me, to mean that the bulk of Sagan’s arguments against Velikovsky are baseless.
Maybe these bar graphs will help illustrate why I tend to side with Sagan and not Velikovsky:
In Sagan’s Scientists Confront Velikovsky:
Number of errors:
|—
Number of correct assertions:
|---------------------------------------------------------
In Velikovsky’s Worlds In Collision:
Number of errors:
|---------------------------------------------------------
Number of correct assertions:
|—
Bar graphs!
This is the part you conveniently ignored.* (I did not mention it in my previous post, hoping you’d fall into my trap. And you did.)
To be a comet, it must be composed of these same elements. (If it is not composed of these elements, it’s something else, like a planet.) If it was composed of these elements, there would be precious little of it left now because of its close distance to the Sun. (And I don’t think you or Velikovsky have ever argued that Venus was once much larger than it is now.) IOW, the sun’s heat would have boiled most of it away. Also, it would have had a tail streaming out from it, forever pointed away from the Sun, like a comet. Do any ancient astronomers record seeing Venus with a tail? I doubt it.
Friendly advice: Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
- Conviently ignoring things seems to be a habit with you. A link that YOU provided has this to say about the Mayan calendar:
The final paragraph says:
Either you didn’t see that part or you deliberately ignored it.
Velikovsky and physics are sometimes right. Make enough weird claims based on ancient myths and it is just a matter of time before you make a hit. Velikovsky did not care about science it was his myths he wanted to defend.
I wonder what else Einstein entertained himself with.
DaddyMack wrote:
Einstein also let himself get talked into chatting with Wilhelm Reich. Reich had started out as a psychiatrist, like Velikovsky had, and came up with all sorts of hairbrained theories (e.g. bions and orgone energy), just like Velikovsky had.
Hmmm … I’m beginning to sense a pattern here…
Orgone was said to produce a good orgasm. I’m tempted to try that, at least once. Man! that Einstein was really a smart guy.
I wrote:
Oh, I just noticed another parallel between Velikovsky and Reich. In Reich’s Cosmic Superimposition, he states that gravity is a myth – the sun and planets don’t actually attract each other, they are merely following the spiralling trails of “kreiselwelle” (spinning waves of orgone energy in space). In Velikovsky’s Cosmos Without Gravitation, Velikovsky also states that gravity doesn’t exist in the usual sense, and is merely an electromagnetic phenomenon.
Coincidence? Or … conspiracy!
DaddyMack wrote:
Well, not quite. Reich never claimed, for example, that you’d have better orgasms if you had sex in one of his “orgone accumulator” boxes. Reich claimed that the orgone energy accumulator – and related devices, like the orgone shooter and the DOR buster – could help restore the “healthy” flow of orgone energy in the body of a neurotic patient, if used in conjunction with conventional therapy. A neurotic that regained his natural healthy orgone flow would become “orgastically potent,” meaning (s)he was capable of “complete surrender” during an orgasm. It was this completely-surrendered-to orgasm that was supposed to be “superior” to the “stifled” orgasms that neurotic people have.
Proponents of Reich’s theories tend to attack anyone who claims Reich was the prophet of the better orgasm. Reich himself complained bitterly of patients flocking to his door who “wanted orgastic potency poured into them by the bucketfull.” Nevertheless, Reich insisted that orgastic potency – which is, to be blunt, completely subjective and immeasurable – should be used as the primary indicator of emotional health. (In Reich’s later years, he claimed that emotional health was synonymous with a healthy, “self-regulating” orgone flow within the body.)
AnotherHeretic wrote:
I won’t be threatened until they want to teach this stuff in school along with creationism. If 99.99% of all scientists disagree with a particular theory the theory in all likelihood is incorrect and the individual that clings to that theory is most likely a crackpot.
I’m interested in knowing if you think there are any invalid concepts or crackpot ideas for that matter? What other theories this guy held that you feal have merit?
I know it is said that ignorance is bliss and that there’s a sucker born every minute, but is that true in your world? 
Tracer wrote:
Now that’s interesting. Einstein final days were spent studying gravity and what caused it. He though it was a property of space. Now could those meetings with Velikovsky and Reich center on the topic of gravity? After all Newton was an alchemist and he laid the groundwork for some of Einstein’s theories. However, both Velikovsky and Reich had total disregard for the scientific method and Velikovsky even used psudohistory to support his theories.
Scientists are the type of people who, if they find manure in the first five places they look in someone’s work, don’t assume there’s a pony in there somewhere.
The two (or three) points where Velikovsky was right are either trivial or irrelevant to his thesis.
My time is too precious to waste here much longer. If you wish to proclaim victory, you are welcome to do so. I’ve really just gotten bored.
This is too easy I won’t even bother
[/quote]
?, too easy to loose to perhaps.
[quote]
OK. So you back up Sagan’s critique? You feel that his math and methodology were correct? If not, then come out and be a man, attack him for the hatchet job. If you back him up, that’s be even better. But you probably don’t have the guts to do either.
[quote]
I have never read Sagan’s critique, and im not about to back it up blindly. However, his credentals are much better than V.
My position on the whole thing was just to point out that science does not accept “fringe science” ideas, because they are NOT science. Just wackos who through the use of semantics try to pass it off as such. How I let myself be dragged into the conversation about V im not sure. I, like DrF, am bored. Bye.
I take this back. What I mean by fringe science may be different from what it really means. I dunno. It would probably be safer to say that I consider it to be the same as PsuedoScience. Similar in sanity to those that promote magnetic armbands to cure cancer or give immortality. Or how about that electromagnetic device that allows you to throw your astral self back into time? They talk pretty enough that Joe-Schmo might think its science, but thats about as far as it goes.
I don’t know about Arp, again, never read up on him, might just do so. From what I see of V’s works, he seems to fit right in the Psuedoscience category just nicely.
Sorry, had to make myself a bit more clear.
DaddyMack wrote:
'Twould make a good movie script, but 'tis not the case. Reich’s meeting with Einstein dealt with (A) his “orgonoscope,” which allegedly allowed him to see little blue jolts of orgone energy in the air, and (B) the temperature difference between the air immediately above an open-top orgone accumulator and the air elsewhere in the room (Reich contended that the average temperature above an accumulator was always a degree or so higher than its surroundings). Reich didn’t formulate his notion of cosmic orgone energy “causing” gravity until a few years later.
Amedeus wrote:
Ah! But have you ever met any dead people who use magnetic arm bands? Hmm? Huh? Hmm?!
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by AnotherHeretic *
**
I find this line of reasoning to be fairly objectionable. I am a scientist, and there are many times I have had to revise my view of things as better evidence has come in. Despite your twisted view of scientists, most of them are like me. Certainly, we are human, and don’t like to change our worldviews, but I have found by and large that scientists are far more likely to accept change than most other people.
I think it is Arp himself who cannot let go of a dead theory. I read Seeing Red, and I found his arguments to be thin indeed. Isn’t it just slightly possible that Arp is completely wrong and refuses to admit it? Can’t it be that he is actually doing what you accuse mainstream scientists of doing?
The same can be said of Velikovskiism. No matter how much evidence is brought forth showing that Venus simply cannot do what V said it did, people won’t drop the ideas V wrote about. Who is it that cannot be swayed?
If I felt that any of these theories had real merit I would do what I could to promote them so that people would at least think about them. Bet on it. But it is a matter of fact that the radical theories must stand the test of time, evidence and prediction to be accepted, and Velikovsky’s ideas simply don’t pass this test. Many astronomers have read his work, and found it to be completely unphysical.
I mentioned this before, but I am reading Worlds In Collision right now. I will post more here and on my own site when I can.
True, and those people traveling through time can’t be seen because it is only their astral self traveling. Prove to me that their astral self isn’t really traveling back in time. Huh, huh, come on prove it.
To address the OP, and not the Velikovsky issues, one example of “mainstream” science dismissing, out of hand, “fringe” science was a fairly recent ulcer study.
A medical researcher found that ulcers were caused by a type of bacteria (helicobacter pylori), not stress, as had been the earlier assumption.
To get the establishment to accept his documented research, he actually had to infect himself with the bacteria and document his subsequent developement of ulcers.
Actually, Barry Marshall appears to have ingested the bug to get quick attention, rather than because no peer-reviewed journal would accept his work. He is a bit of a wild character and he irritated people by making big claims for his discovery which he had not yet submitted to peer review. Swallowing the bug was a way to make the point without having to do the tedious part of the science. The big problem came not from the medical community, per se but from a reluctance of pharmaceutical companies to fund research into a bug that might easily be cured by expired-patent antibiotics rather than medicated with life-long prescriptions of Tagamet®.
I am not suggesting that there was no reluctance from the medical community to review his work. The problem arises from the idea that all the research doctors simply ignored all his efforts to explain himself, when he had actually chosen to not go through their normal methods of presentation.