Immanuel Velikovsky
From RationalWiki
Immanuel Velikovsky (1895–1979) was a Russian psychologist and pseudohistorian notable for his controversial 1950 book Worlds in Collision and his rather extreme form of catastrophism in which he postulated that many of the stories of ancient legend (especially those of Greco-Roman mythology and the Bible such as the Global flood and the destruction of the Tower of Babel) were the result of a series of collisions and near-misses between the planets of the solar system, particularly interactions involving Venus (which he theorized to be a monstrous comet), Jupiter (from which Venus was supposedly ejected), and Earth.
While Velikovsky continues to have followers (including the notorious internet kook Ted Holden), his teachings can be quite easily rejected on their face for a number of reasons. Among other things, he made very few testable predictions, and produced much butchered science:
- Some Velikovskyites have asserted that Velikovsky predicted that Venus would be "hot". While the ambient surface temperature on Venus is the highest of any of the terrestrial planets, Velikovsky never really explained what he meant by "hot" — hotter than Earth? Hot as in made of melted rock? Hot as in a nuclear furnace, like a small star? Hot like she is pictured in The Birth of Venus? The assertion is too vague to be meaningful.
- No mechanism was ever offered to eject Venus from Jupiter, and current science shows no way to do this without expending impossible amounts of energy or disrupting the rather complex Jovian orbital system, including its rings and many moons.
- Velikovsky does not explain why a body consisting mostly of hydrogen would eject one whose geology more closely resembles that of Earth.
- We know what comets are; scientists most succinctly refer to them as "dirty snowballs", blobs of water ice and organics. Venus is a rocky planet with a stable orbit, with no comet-like qualities save a large amount of water gas in the atmosphere.
- In attempting to explain the fall of manna in the story of the Exodus, Velikovsky routinely confused hydrocarbons with carbohydrates, a mistake that should seemingly be impossible for any educated person.
Velikovsky also butchered his mythology, twisting known historical chronology and making elementary mistakes such as conflating the goddesses Aphrodite and Athena to explain the origin of the myth of Athena's birth from a hole in Zeus' head.
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