let me get this staght, TD/AL: you’re the one both posting under two user names & posting racial slurs and you consider me to have a mediocre mind?
Well, I guess bigotry doesn’t follow logic.
Only in number of posts. Sheer volume, there’s no comparison. Do you know how long it takes to load this page?
Not remotely.
I suppose it wouldn’t do any good to point out that translates into plain English as, “I’m a lazy moron who can’t be bothered with facts.”
One more pitiable victim of Kruger-Dunning syndrome.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
from Tom Dark:
You can conclude whatever you wish. The rest of us will conclude otherwise. Let’s just agree to conclude.
Apologies in advance, all, but I just can’t stop myself … I’ll try to be brief.
That’s going to be a tough one for you to counter. There’s lots of information freely available. I venture to guess that you have not seen any of it, and will not look at any of it. I predict that any argument you make will be of the five-year-old-whining “is too true” variety. For the benefit of any that are interested, Hypothesis - Unreliability of Eyewitness Testimony and Identification, Eyewitness Testimony - links, Eyewitness Testimony, Eyewitness Testimony Questioned, Psychology Cross-Examines Eyewitness Testimony, From the Lab to the Police Station: A Successful Application of Eyewitness Research, Eyewitness Testimony and the Paranormal, Eyewitness Identification - Human Factors
But you haven’t. I’ve read WIC, although it was some time ago, and I’ve forgotten some; the book is eminently forgettable. A quick perusal of writings pro and con about WIC turns up two (pretty far from a dozen); Venus is warm, and Jupiter emits radio waves. The number of wrong conclusions is staggering; where are the verminous inhabitents of Venus?
So Velikovsky trumpeted evidence for his theories and concealed evidence against his theories. Not the behavior expected of a scientist or an honest layperson.
jrf
Apologies again, JonF. Time merely for a couple of keen-honed insults, and to comply with one or two of your requests over which you are now poking my chest – unwarrantedly, as you’ll see.
First: 360 degrees in a circle, because of the number of days in the year once; this many days because Velikovsky who cited “countless” instances of that fact from ancient history said so… a fraction of the testimony researched appears in WORLDS IN COLLISION, pp 172- something or other. I forget. But that fraction is a lot of instances.
Next, Monty, I don’t believe there’s a bit of truth to the accusation that you sniff motorcycle seats. But if you did, I’m sure it would be only the back part of the seat. Correct me if I’m wrong.
As to us overtaking “Up the Butt, Bob” (Monty has no reaction to a title such as this), I am an artist of quality such that the posts must be long and mighty efforts, if not coherent, as well as more numerous. For this JonF is a man after my own heart. I will reward him now with the requested information. Off the top of my head, according to my preferred rules of thumb, here:
Item one: what do you mean, “where are the vermin from Venus?” You mean to tell me you have ignored our six-legged contributor Kennedy, here? Where do you think his ancestors came from? Item two: this failure in your observation ought as well serve to illustrate the unreliability of human observation without a lot of spurious hodgepodge of dopey tests: we see you’re not that good at observation yourself. But despite batteries of tests and statistics, some are.
When it’s something as big as a bunch of god-damned PLANETS staring you up the ass and shooting lightning up it, you can BET some few are observant enough to write it down or make a singsong about it that can be memorized without much change down through the generations.
Thus these ancient stories from ALL around the world, everywhere, all written cultures, all oral traditions, all from the same epoch. And more. Don’t argue about it being impossible according to the patchwork called Newtonian Physics. There are more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of etc… the amount of testimony available outweighs by megatons any attempt to discourage questions about it in favor of formulas saying it cain’t be so. Even if some of it IS in the bible, and even if some herds of imbeciles make other of those records than is there.
Certainly Kennedy did not originate on Mars. V. suggested only that pestilent microbes might yet be found on Mars, not full-scale locust-like vermin. Which reminds me of that news scare-item 3 years or so back, about meteorites from Mars containing fossilized bacteria. Velikovsky thought this up in 1940. (He also thought of terrestrial visits by people from other planets, but realized he would already get in plenty of trouble with the other findings.)
I won’t count this in the request for a dozen instances of his correct “hits.” Scientists are still arguing over what was possible about what they observed in the meteorites. They don’t seem to have yet even observed that the incongruously enormous amounts of nickel found on the ocean floor, all apparently from meteorites, might have resulted from incongruously enormous meteor showers in the geologically current past.
In his challenge, JonF failed to have observed a few items I reluctantly mentioned 'way early on, besides the commonly known Venus temp and Jupiter waves. Likely because he is yet eager to discredit Velikovsky entirely and so would make mistakes – one notable mistake in particular, impugning V.'s methodology and honesty with the horse-caca about the Herodotus quote, taking from another Gullible Skeptic Know-It-All site.
I ought not fail to mention too that the admission “it’s been some time since I read WiC” is far too late in coming. There were already too many unconvincing statements about having read WiC, make without any qualification, but presented as though to imply anything like fair knowledge of the book. Obviously JonF hasn’t any fair knowledge of the book, nor of EARTH IN UPHEAVAL. He has made some belittling statements that wouldn’t be possible to make, having read either, even 25 years ago. There is too much, too memorable. Nor has anyone else in this argument read enough to make claims of being knowledgable about those two books – excepting Larson, who’s retired from the fray, triumphant.
I mentioned the presence of neon gas trapped in rocks brought back from the moon; the presence of argon gas trapped in rocks brought back from the moon; the presence of scattered magnetic fields set in different directions on the moon; the indication of self-generated lunar heat; excess radiation on the moon. Plus a good many other things I’ve long forgotten.
The fact that the “canals” on Mars must be great rifts, somewhere double the height of earth’s mountains; the fact that the polar caps of Mars must be carbon dioxide, not water
– by the way, V.'s suggestion that water on Mars must be barely present any more due to catastrophic evaporation recently got a nice little boost, as the last gizmo they sent up there that worked returned evidence of “water flooding at what must have been a rate of at least a billion gallons a second!” – this I noticed not long ago in some science mag.
Where was I? Oh yes – that Mars’ atmosphere must be largely CO2 and Neon and Argon, just to name 3 in one sentence. The fact that the terrain of Mars must be a vast wasteland of shattered rock and dead volcanic activity. And that Mars still – But there’s more or less a dozen, yes? Tho’ I remember a good deal more.
Also, it is just about dirty pool to suppose that the falsely-characterized “handful” of correct presumptions Velikovsky made about the nature of the planets, as he did back in 1940 – remember the date, 1940, not 46, 49, 50, etc. – were insignificant gestures of some scattershot wild guesses.
In fact, give me 40 of Velikovsky’s so-called wild guesses about the geological makeup up the planets of the solar system that turned out to be untrue. Give me 40. And get your mind off the math. This was not a theoretical physicist. This was a historian making very educated guesses about the geology of the planets based on reading ancient tracts from around the planet earth and back.
The correct presumptions he made from this reading were hardly insignificant.
The discovery in 1955 of radio waves exploding from the planet Jupiter – the same sort of violent static one gets during heavy thunderstorms here on earth – was considered sensational. It made the front page of the New York Times. Astronomers of the day were, so to speak, thunderstruck. It was unexpected.
Velikovsky had come to that conclusion fifteen years earlier. Because he had been boycotted and blackballed and discriminated against for having had the audacity to think more originally than the former hack reporter and King of the Kosmos Harlow Shapley, no one would lift a finger toward looking into whether not his propositions had a grain of truth to them. That would have been a simple one. Instead it was discovered by accident, and astronomers everywhere gasped at the front page news it made. So did Einstein.
Incidentally, JonF, you have made a good many contradictory statements in the course of this argument. Some you will not see. Others, I’d like an explanation. In one posting you said in one paragraph that tests ought have been made about V.'s ideas; some sentences down you claim that tests had been done and he was all wrong. Had tests been done in the few minutes between those two statements? Or what was your meaning?
The idea that the planets had electrical charges was a “heresy” by Velikovsky. But they do, don’t they? We’re a good deal beyond a dozen now, aren’t we?
At this point, I’m not going to accept any “debunking” of the points I recalled for the argument about “a dozen instances” where V. was correct. The only direction to go in further insistence at feigning disproof is to begin to construct lies or delusions. Whi
Ah, TD/AL, you are evidently unaware of what constitutes proof in the reality shared by the great majority of people (excluding you).
The comment about me sniffing seats is a rumour you started now in a quite childish attempt to make me look silly but, alas, is one more bit of evidence you know not of what you speak.
For one thing, nobody’s seen me sniff a cycle seat. Mainly because I don’t, but as there’s no evidence, you really should apologize. I won’t hold my breath, liar.
For another thing, there is ample proof here in this thread of your racism, not to mention your refusal to accept facts. The proof of your racism is the slurs you’ve posted.
You still haven’t addressed any of my basic questions. And, if you can’t handlle the math or find some reference to someone who can, admit it. You just can’t do it without the math.
I did not mean to refer to any of the participants in this discussion. I was referring to one of Velikovsky’s thousands of incorrect predictions; I thought the reference would be obvious to one familiar with WIC. Since you’re apparently not:
“Venus - and therefore Jupiter - is populated by vermin; this organic life can be the source of petroleum.”
Yes. And my point is that they are guaranteeed to be incorrect in key details.
Prediction confirmed. Pathetic.
[quote]
that can be memorized without much change down through the generations.
[/quote
What evidence do you have that there would not be much change?
[quote]
ALL around the world, everywhere, all written cultures, all oral traditions[\quote]
No. Widely distributed, but not all.
No.
Why not? I hesitate to introduce an analogy, because you obviously do not understand the structure and results of science sufficiently to understand it, but here goes.
Suppose I introduced a “scientific” theory that explained many things in a way that you found comforting, and seemed to tie up a lot of apparent loose ends. However, one problem with the theory is that it predicts that gasoline cannot be ignited. Would you not ask what I think makes your car go? Would you decide that maybe some mysterious force that we don’t yet understand makes your car go?
To one who knows Newtonian mechanics and its relationship to science and everyday life and experience, Velikovsky’s proposals make as much sense as ignoring the fact that gasoline makes your car go.
No. See the above quote.
What was scary about that item? The observation is not yet fully explained, but it is the only observation (of many) that suggests any trace of life on Mars at any time. The consensus now is that it was not a bacterium. But maybe it was.
What proof do you have that it’s not possible to make such statements? I state that I have read WIC, some long time ago, and that it’s eminently forgettable (except as an example of bad science).
Apparently Larsen has retired from the fray, but only the excessively gullible would claim “triumphant”. He convinced no-one, except you, of anything
I count exactly a dozen, counting the one you said you wouldn’t count and counting each constituent of the atmosphere of Mars and each gas found in moon rocks as a separate correct prediction. Still not “dozens or hundreds”. And each with no reference to supporting evidence, which I just don’t have the time to dig up and check. I suspect that some of those “correct predictions” would turn out to be phantasms.
But, assuming that they are correct, what’s a few correct predictions compared to many more incorrect predictions, especially the major ones that, if incorrect, blow Velikovsky’s theories completely away?
I assume that you just assumed that quote to be “horse-caca” because you don’t like it. Scientists and honest inquirers do not assume such things. I don’t read greek, but the translations of the entire Herodotus text are available at MIT and Marquette They agree that the entire paragraph 142 is:
“Thus far I have spoken on the authority of the Egyptians and their priests. They declare that from their first king to this last-mentioned monarch, the priest of Vulcan, was a period of three hundred and forty-one generations; such, at least, they say, was the number both of their kings, and of their high-priests, during this interval. Now three hundred generations of men make ten thousand years, three generations filling up the century; and the remaining forty-one generations make thirteen hundred and forty years. Thus the whole number of years is eleven thousand, three hundred and forty; in which entire space, they said, no god had ever appeared in a human form; nothing of this kind had happened either under the former or under the later Egyptian kings. The sun, however, had within this period of time, on four several occasions, moved from his wonted course, twice rising where he now sets, and twice setting where he now rises. Egypt was in no degree affected by these changes; the productions of the land, and of the river, remained the same; nor was there anything unusual either in the diseases or the deaths.”
Exactly what the skeptic site claimed. And, in passing, how does the period of time mentioned square with your claim of “all from the same epoch”?
I’m not much up on geology, so I won’t take up this challenge.
The number of correct or incorrect predictions is not a major measure. A few incorrect predictions mean nothing; science evolves, and no theory springs full-formed. Likewise, a few correct predictions are nice but also are not of major significance. The theory as a whole must be tested and evolve or be discarded.
I’ll grant you a few correct predictions, but I will not grant you the possibility of the planets moving as they must have for any of Velikovsky’s scenario to be true.
I can’t find the statements to which you refer. More detail, please? I suspect that you’ve misinterpreted them, but if
One more thing … the one “correct prediction” claim you made that I can evaluate without extensive research:
Thre are indeed great rifts and mountains on Mars, but they have no correlation with the locations of the supposed canals. So this prediction is at best partly right; there are features on Mars similar to what Velikovsky proposed, but the canals are somehting totally different.
I’ve reviewed all my posts carefully, and can’t find the claims about tests to which you referred. Note that I’m not saying they don’t exist; just that I can’t find them.
<h2>~Siiiigh</h2>
Okay, JonF. Following is another reason I don’t much care to get into “the facts” in an argument like this one (another reason is that I prefer to get paid for the work)… but, following here is pertinent to the alleged criticism of Velikovsky’s scholarly integrity via the quote by Herodotus. Please read the following:
“Pomponius Mela, a Latin author of the first century wrote: ‘The Egyptians pride themselves on being the most ancient people in the world. In their authentic annals…one may read that since they have been in existence, the course of the stars has changed direction four times, and the sun has set twice in the part of the sky where it rises today.’ [ Worlds in Collision, p.119 ]”
That’s from WORLDS IN COLLISION. Page 119. Velikovsky didn’t quote Herodotus about the sunrise/sets, he quoted Pomponious Mela. Your sources are dishonest. Many of V.'s critics were and are quite dishonest, or at best, appallingly, arrogantly thoughtless, sails puffed with some unaccounted zealotry against him.
I recall few quotes from Herodotus by Velikovsky, and the one about the sunrise/sets isn’t one of them. One I do recall is Velikovsky correcting Herodotus’ statement taken from Egyptian priests that Egypt had been a continuous civilizaton for 11,000 years. V. pointed out that the priests were exaggerating by far.
So I’m back to what I assumed to start with, the criticism you referred me to here is just the usual horse caca. V. generally multiply cross-referenced everything he surmised and concluded, and that’s why scholars who READ THE GOD DAMNED WORK called his scholarship “STAGGERING.”
I think you miscounted. I counted the items of my last sentence about Mars as 2. You probably didn’t. Ungenerous, aren’t we, lad?
Besides, I tossed in a couple more afterward, being generous, myself. So, go see if Saturn has chlorine in it.
Yes, there are just piles of such possible “proofs,” of V.'s B.C. scenario, and they are all of the character that believers can nit-pick them one way, and non-believers can nit-pick them t’other. My feeling is that one may as well nit-pick at the square root of 2.
Nitpicky nitpicky. Velikovsky didn’t count up presumptuously observed “canals” on Mars and assign a heighth to each of as the incorrect presumption of your ad-lib criticism would infer. Yours is irrelevant, except to return to you your pointless use of the word “pathetic” now sharpened and directed appropriately.
He made the statement in passing without having done more than most people do, which is to have read about them. Maybe he looked at some of the same murky photoes we all did. What people were reading at the time was still fairy tales about them possibly having even been constructed by little green men, as it were.
So he was quite right in the proper context, no matter how one may nitpick about what he was SUPPOSED to mean according to rules one may set up posthaste to prejudice against the simple truth of the matter.
Velikovsky found the prevailing scientific speculations about the “so-called canals” of Mars unlikely. He found it more likely that WHATEVER they were supposed to be, they’d be the result of near-collisions with Venus. This, according to thumbnail calculations, would raise fissures or mountains of thus and so height. This turned out to be the case.
Suppose YOU tell me where one particular crack in Mars’ surface came from. Its proportions are unbelievable. What’s it called? The Valle Marinarus? It’s hundreds of miles wide and thousands of miles long.
I would like to read a criticism of Velikovsky that does NOT entail this most peculiar dishonesty I have seen. The other day I read some supposedly prominent imbecile, still trying in vain to stomp on Velikovsky’s bones, making a fool of himself with arrogance the way Kennedy here does.
He took statements one-by-one out of WiC and “disproved” them. This man was either a first class idiot and we had BETTER cease funding NASA NOW, or he was made an idiot by some strange hysteria to disprove what he chooses to misunderstand.
V. had written: “It is expected that Mercury orbits keeping its face to the sun.”
The prominent imbecile pounced on that statement. How untrue Velikovsky was, he gloated and belched. This man was an imbecile. In 1940, it WAS expected that Mercury kept one side to the sun. And that’s what it said still in my kiddie science textbooks, decades later.
And the prominent imbecile went all the way down the line, picking out one science truth-of-the-day after another, ascribing them all to Velikovsky, instead of to official science from which V. was merely quoting. This prominent imbecile was blaming Velikovsky for the scientific truisms of the day.
This prominent imbecile would not be worth mentioning, except that I’d got to his site by his being quoted as more sound criticism of V. by other prominent imbeciles.
I have been sincere in looking for criticism of V.'s ideas. The best I’ve seen anyone do is water down his theory to comets – that is, the little “dirty snowball” things, rather than a planet-sized entity like Venus bearing a tail, hit the earth within mankind’s memory. But tomes of testimony have to be ignored to reach that conclusion.
Searching for measured, even criticism, MOSTLY what I’ve found is crap. Crap attributed to V. that he didn’t say. Crap that’s mere bickering over mythological details not grasped as well as V. grasped them. Postehaste crap, such as attributing science’s mistakes to V. for his having accepted them for sake of argument – or putting “calculations” in V.'s head that he never made, setting him up like a strawman. Crap spattered on his character by emotionally retarded, semi-literate individuals who call themselves “scientists,” who, in actuality, are personalities as problematical as the nut-case fundamentalist christians who frighten them so.
I don’t buy the crap about “Innanna wasn’t the planet Venus” or that “Seth-Typhon in Egypt was Venus, but Typhon wasn’t Venus in Greece.” Nor do I buy the criticisms drawn from HAMLET’S MILL by Santillana and Von Dichend, which I read in 1973. They had less basis on which to draw their conclusions than did V. for his. And V.'s make more sense. Otherwise, if Von Dichend & co. were correct, then, there is an innate urge for every boy to kill his younger brother. That’s absurd.
It makes a lot more sense to realize that those peoples observed overwhelming events in the sky between what they saw as living, breathing super-creatures. Most “primitive” religions are animist in nature. This means they assign living personalities to what we “moderns” think of as inanimate objects, such as Kennedy’s head.
By the way JF, your lack of a sense of humor is a tad too apparent. And you can’t prove there are no vermin on Venus – and let’s be clear, too: vermin, meaning visible small creatures. Like insects and larger.
The Tunguski, however, and this is only a claim by supposed researchers, say they saw a flaming rock come down over Tunguska. They didn’t give it a name. So if there’s any truth to it, they saw what looked like a big flaming rock headed for the woods from the sky. They didn’t think of it as a god. They didn’t give it a name.
Neither did the ancients name the meteorites that came down one after another. They called them “stones.” The big moving things in the sky, however, were gods – to their minds, living, breathing superbeings of an overwhelming order. Those gods were making the stones and the thunderbolts and the red rains and the fiery rains come.
The things in the sky couldn’t possibly have been the measly little sprays of light we call comets these days. They would have called them “little measly lights in the sky.” And if a comet came close enough to collide with earth, it couldn’t have been in the sky looking large enough, long enough, to have earned all the descriptions and awe and honor and centuries of fearful worship and appeasement through sacrifices that the planets were given. The destruction would not have appeared world-wide to
So you’re now admitting that you’ve just been making all that stuff up?
OK, I’ll admit you got me there. I could pick a few nits; why did Velikovsky quote Mela when Herodotus was available and Velikovsky was obviously aware of that? Did Velikovsky take the 11,000 years error from the paragraph I quoted and, if so, why did he not include the final sentence in his analysis?
But those are indeed nits, and not very important.
I have attempted to answer your questions, even those that lie outside my field of expertise. Let’s get back the the questions you have not had the courtesy to address:
What mechanism or mathematical model do you propose to account for the supposed path of Venus or the astronomical body of your choice and observable and observed facts about the motion of bodies in the Solar system? You can inveigh against Newton all you want, but 300+ years of correct predictions still must be accounted for.
How do you propose that people, aerobic life, and delicate geological structures survived this encounter?
Where are the globally-distributed records of this supposed enounter?
jrf
Just stopped by over here to see why 360 degrees kept popping up on “today’s active threads.” Wow! And I thought I was windy! This just blows me away.
Hey guys, you can’t quit now!
I barely graduated from high school so I probably don’t even qualify as a mediocre mind to you genius folks. I have not understood much of what you people have been talking about and I have never heard of Velikovsky, but I do know of Einstein. He’s that guy that had a theory about his relatives, E and MC, being a couple of squares right? What I really DO know, however, is that this is one the most entertaining threads I have ever come across, complete with multiple personalities and the most eloquent insults I have ever read. At the risk of getting myself called stupid, I would like to defend the fact as to why some of us aren’t interested in science. We aren’t all born in that 98 percentile of smart guys and sometimes we just don’t get it no matter how much we want to. But you know, you need us dumb bunnies to make you all look so good,so we do serve our purpose. Anyway, thanks for all enjoyment, I especially liked that summary, and would like to wish you all a Happy Tomdarkian day.
I’m not trying to force anyone to be interested in science, although I encourage that interest. It’s difficult to get along in much of U.S. society without some knowledge.
I discourage fantasy masquerading as science.
jrf
Masquerade? Heck, in TD/AL’s case, it’s one mighty thin veil. One might even say transparent, even.
Oh all right, all right, back for an encore.
Thank you, Kim. I want you to know I’ve been to college and stuff, but there isn’t a damn thing I’ve written here that came from college or high school.
I had to teach my kid to read and write properly; his teachers couldn’t even spell his name right. So I haven’t a lot of respect for the current education system. It lately seems to be a breeding ground for bumpkins who wish to pose as snobs. I helped get my local school budget voted down 5 times awhile back after announcing on that and some other news on the radio about the marvels of our public schooling system.
(Yes, JonF, to answer one of your questions, tho’ sarcastic you were: you can make a goddam FORTUNE being “out among the people in the real world.” Been there.)
Besides that, education systems have never produced nor encouraged those people who have instituted revolutionary modes of thinking, or made inventions or artwork or literature which intruded on the course of history and changed it, for better or worse.
They couldn’t. They can provide paint-by-numbers instructions on the whole. Not that this is a basic evil. We do need those who will follow and maintain what’s been deemed good, so long as we know when it ceases being good and starts smelling mummified.
Original thinking must come from deep within the character of the individual bold enough to take what advantage there is to be had in it. Like a Black Sheep of the Universe, one must be foolhardy enough to insist on following one’s own inspirations, if at the risk of attacks and opprobrium from the white sheep, who fear going a few steps apart from the flock and are scandalized by those who dare try.
Velikovsky was such a Black Sheep. It is not as though he were the first to think those ideas. His basic notions were common until Darwin’s rationalizations hooked the imaginations of the flocks of popular scientists. There was a “crackpot” writer who produced an odd book in the 1920’s that came to very similar conclusions about the nature of the solar system, from a very limited reading of mythology. Velikovsky imitated no one, however. He stuck to his own unique vision and obeyed a strict conscience that demanded he pursue every ramification of what he concluded, right or wrong, obstinately, to the day of his death at age 84.
In that, he was not merely a “better writer than most of his critics,” as one observing the battle commented; he also had more integrity by far than some of the outraged pop scientists whose cozy fame and laurels his ideas threatened. His ideas also threatened their acolytes and disciples. They became irrational. Science is just a religion with gizmoes. The priests behave the same.
Geezer, your remarks were boring even brief. I’ll be sure not to be there when YOU get “long-winded.” Sure, blow away.
Monty, are you done sniffing motorcycle seats already? Ask Jill to check Larson’s and my IP addresses. She can note the difference. Then go back to your sniffing.
JonF, there are TOO MANY questions of yours I haven’t got to. Haven’t time. Some I ain’t gonna, 'cause I see a psychology in operation that would merely make for a mobius-strip sort of continuation.
One, however, is the question to which you haven’t accepted my answer. Again: I don’t need to have, nor do I have any model or equation to explain the mechanics of a giant comet being expelled from Jupiter, going on a short-period erratic orbit as a giant comet, approaching earth, both repelling each other like magnets do, then doing same with Mars centuries later, making Mars come dangerously close to earth, then settling into its present orbit and being named a god, or Venus nowadays…
…after having bumped earth from ITS orbit, which previously consisted of a nice even 360 days a year, which is where the number of degrees given a circle originated.
What is needed is an investigation. All investigations were deliberately impeded in order to keep Velikovsky ostracized. That IS historical fact. Nevertheless, technological advances unintended to explore Velikovsky’s ideas have yielded astonishing possible affirmations of them.
And for the 4th or so time, put yet one more way, it is not necessary to first have a model or a law in order to perceive a thing, either in heaven or on earth. But if such a thing is perceived that seems to violate the laws, then those laws must come into question. You do not yet realize that you refuse to conceive V.'s scenario because you have “laws” prohibiting you from even imagining it.
Velikovsky says people saw planetary disaster in the sky and under their feet, and that is what is recorded in ancient history all around the world; everywhere “old myths” are recorded or handed down through the generations… even in Papua, New Guinea. Indeed, how DO the mud-people there know that Saturn has rings? They knew it just like everybody else in history knew it. Ever try to find Saturn by naked eye? The mud-people alive today know there’s a little dot in the night sky called Saturn, which is a god by another name to them, and that it is surrounded by rings. They call the rings a “head-band.”
With better than average vision, one may spot the most subtle blobbiness to that little dot of light called Saturn. I learned that when a kid and my brother and I fooled around with a 300x telescope. We knew we were looking for rings. But the peoples of the ancient world all saw those rings and COUNTED THEM. My vision was superb. I could see ants wandering a hundred yards away. How did the ancients see those rings? They said the planet was closer, then it went far away, into the “underworld” one way or another.
We have also the cadeuceus, said to be a sign from the sky. You know the cadeuceus, yes? The entwined snakes on the rod of Mercury? Guess what they’ve found among the rings of Saturn? Cadeuceii. They seem to form and unform out of ring fragments. They say Mercury trailed a cadeuceus when it left Saturn on its way to the sun. This means Mercury skimmed past the earth within the memory of humankind.
Again. There are FAR TOO MANY instances in the fables of the peoples of the earth that correspond to actual physical facts about the nature of the planets of this solar system, to put it off as “fantasy.” Einstein did not put Velikovsky’s research off. He found it extremely important, and quite troubling. I presume you read the letters you posted here.
Incidentally, Einstein’s amused comments about “wild robber’s tale” and so on were NOT directed at Velikovsky’s ideas. This is another instance of a pervasive dishonesty among V’s critics. Even that old Harvard slimeball Gingrich wrote a lie in an article spitting at Velikovsky in Scientific American just a couple years ago. Einstein’s notes were referring to the theories of past scientists that Velikovsky researched and had reproduced in the particular chapter that Einstein was reading. He never called Velikovsky’s ideas “fantasy” or “wild robber’s tale,” etc. So here again, his critics commit deliberate libels.
I asked you to give me 40 instances where Velikovsky was wrong about his expectations of the nature of the planets and solar system. You replied you could not give a single one. Exactly. You can’t.
Not because it’s a trick. Not because it’s a sophistry. It’s because he hasn’t been proven wrong in any empirical matter. His attempt to develop the very math you keep asking for never got very far. Other than that, the physical evidence, wiped clean of the scientific “shoulds” peppered over it, tend far more to prove his case.
Newton’s myth – and Newton alone could not sustain it – has lasted a MERE 300 years, kid. “Absolute truths” have lasted far longer than that before cast away in favor of other “absolute truths.” That’s another thing I started rolling this ball with. Nobody seems to have noticed it.
I personally would LOVE to find out what laws produced the construction of the pyramids and places like Baalbek. NOBODY can reproduce those construction feats, not with 500 bulldozers and 500
{Sigh}
You just aren’t interested in truth.
I did not ask if it is possible to make good money living in the real world. You said that your profession is living in the real world. Do you receive money just for living in the real world? I certainly wouldn’t pay you for that!
Either the laws or the perceptions must come into question. The perceptions are not convincing enough, to one who is familiar with the laws, to seriously question the laws.
The laws of Newtonian mechanics are close enough to correct to rule out Velikovsky’s scenario under those laws. For Velikovsky’s scenario to have happened, something beyond those laws, that has not been noticed in hundreds of years of detailed investigations, is required. Electric charge won’t cut it; I don’t know what was known about the distribution of electric charge in the Solar system in Velikovsky’s time, but we now know that the planets carry no net charge. Magnetism won’t cut it either; the magnetic fields of the planets have been measured. And we know that charge or magnetism that was present then and disappeared before now won’t cut it either; both involve attractive and repulsive forces and there’s no combination of charges or magnetic fields that can explain the supposed motions.
Prove that they do know, with appropriate references. If they indeed do know, discuss the many possible ways, other than direct observation, that they could know, and discuss why those other ways are not likely.
Garbage. Discuss why your theory of the origin of the caedecus is more likely than the other eplanations, that are far simpler.
Fabrication. I have already quoted Einstein, and will do so again:
“However it is evident to every sensible physicist that these catastrophes can have nothing to do with the planet Venus and that also the direction of the inclination of the terrestrial axis towards the ecliptic could not have undergone a considerable change without the total destruction of the entire earth’s crust. Your arguments in this regard are so weak as opposed to the mechanical-astronomical ones, that no expert will be able to take them seriously.”
From another letter:
“The reason for the energetic rejection of the opinions presented by you lies not in the assumption that in the motion of the heavenly bodies only gravitation and inertia are the determining factors. The reason for the rejection lies rather in the fact that on the basis of this assumption it was possible to calculate the temporal changes of star locations in the planetary system with an unimaginably great precision.
Against such precise knowledge, speculations of the kind as were advanced by you do not come into consideration by an expert. Therefore your book must appear to an expert as an attempt to mislead the public.”
From yet another letter:
“Unfortunately, this valuable accomplishment is impaired by the addition of a physical-astronomical theory to which every expert will react with a smile or with anger according to his temperament; he notices that you know these things only from hearsay and do not understand them in the real sense, also things that are elementary to him. He can easily come to the opinion that you yourself don’t believe it, and that you want only to mislead the public.”
Although Einstein did not use the phrases that you mentioned, it is clear that one of the world’s greatest experts in the feld (perhaps the greatest expert ever}, who was known to encourage new ideas and listen to proposals of all natures, who Velikovsky consulted to evaluate his theories, thought his physics were utter hogwash.
I never said any such thing. If you think I did, please provide a quote. I notice that you have not replied to my polite request for a quote establishing your alleagation in a previous post: “JonF, you have made a good many contradictory statements in the course of this argument. Some you will not see. Others, I’d like an explanation. In one posting you said in one paragraph that tests ought have been made about V.'s ideas; some sentences down you claim that tests had been done and he was all wrong.” Is it because you, too, can’t find the source of the allegation? Could it be you made it up, as you have made up so much?
But, since you ask for instances where Velikovsky was wrong about the nature of planets and the Solar system:
Every statement he made about the motion of Venus, Mars, and the Earth was wrong. We have lots of evidence for that. The evidence that gave rise to the theory that the planets move otherwise is not a test of the theory. To test the theory, you must make new predictions and test those predictions.
Although he gave no explicit value or range for the temperature of Venus, he gave enough information to conclude (as I have shown in an earlier post) that there is no possible temperature of Venus that fits all or most of his theories.
Every statement that he made about carbohydrates was wrong.
I bet that’s more than 40.
I’ve noticed it. Newton’s laws are not an adequate explanation of how the universe works. Newton knew that. General Relativity and Quantum Electrodynamics are not adequate explanations of how the world works; Einstein and Feynman knew that. All those theories give correct predictions in a mind-boggling number of observations, and we can even predict exactly when their predictions will not be correct. Any replacement for any of those theories must replicate the correct predictions. It is apparent immediately that Velikovsky’s theories of planetary motion, even though they are not presented as equations, cannot replicate the correct predictions.
As Feynman said (page 22 of “The Meaning of it All”):
"In physics there are so many accumulated observations that it is almost impossible to think of a new idea which is different from all the other ideas that have been thought of before and yet that agrees
TD/AL: One can not go back to where one has never been. Therefore I can not go back to sniffing motorcycle seats.
FWIW: I submit your assertion that I do sniff said seats as incontrovertible proof that your investigative skills are exactly zero and therefore your entire assertions about Velikovsky are not supported by valid research.
JonF: Nor would I pay TD/AL for “living in the real world” as it is manifestly evident that his body may reside here but his mind, assuming such exists, does not.
Jonf,
Just a note to say, Well Done!
TD floods us with messages that seem to have almost zero factual content, are full of teenage insults, and contain many errors and misstatements.
You continue to reply with facts, corrections, and intelligent information. This is “Fighting Ignorance” in a nutshell. Good job.
As an aside, can you expand a little on the explanation of tidal forces you posted? I didn’t go through the math, but it seems odd to me that Venus could pull objects off the surface of the Earth due to tidal forces, when the earth has the stronger overall gravitational pull, and objects are closer (obviously) to the Earth than they are to Venus even during the mythical close approach. Or were you saying that the objects (and some amount of the surface) would be whipped up in a sort of giant maelstrom, to be redeposited later in a, shall we say, somewhat homogenized form?
Anyway, good job. Anyone else think JonF should get the same Sainthood DrFidelis did for his dealings with the nitwit Phaedrus?
Ugly