Talk:Alternate historical chronology

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A new user named Wedgewood added this under Veliskovsky:

"Usenet and other forum discussions have noted the claim that in several instances, raw data involved in phenomena bearing on Velikovsky's theories actually support Velikovsky but that by the time the stories are published, there are invariably explanations of how the experiments in question must have failed, and the data published is that which would have coincided with standard theories since those are always assumed to be correct. The most major such case is the question of albedo (reflectivity) values for Venus as described in an article by F.W. Taylor of the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford in an article on "VENUS", Hunton, Colin, Donahue, Moroz, Univ. of Ariz. Press, 1983, ISBN 0-8165-0788-0. Taylor notes that the observed albedo value of .080 would require the planet to be massively out of thermal balance (as Velikovsky predicted) and that, therefore the value .076 which would produce thermal balance, required by the conventional theory for explaining the surface temperature of the planet, is the "most probable value"

Other such phenomena include ancient motion charts for the planet Venus, and infrared flux measurements associated with the Pioneer Venus mission."

Not sure what the point is, other than to point out an unsourced usenet conspiracy theory, and something unclear about Venus. human 20:31, 12 December 2007 (EST)

I believe the point is that Venus is much hotter than it should be, and that this somehow proves it is a new planet. Something that's been doing the rounds over at talk.origins, as far as I can tell. --AKjeldsen^Godspeed! 20:48, 12 December 2007 (EST)

See, the fundamental problem with claiming Velikovsky got anything right is that he made very few testable predictions (calling Venus "hot" is too vague to be meaningful -- 800F greenhouse effect is nowhere close to a molten blob of lava or a very small star). Of the few he did make, the two most central ones are wrong (Venus as a comet -- no, it's a rocky planet) and impossible (being ejected from Jupiter). And I won't even get into the incredible hash he made of ancient mythology -- conflating Athena and Aphrodite, for example, or making assertions about the appearance of Mars that simply can't be verified by the naked eye. Velikovsky was mindblowingly ignorant, and his followers are even denser than he was, though some are more creative (Ted Holden on Saturn, for example). EVDebs 00:06, 13 December 2007 (EST)

[edit] "Phantom time theory"

Just wondering, the first thing that came to mind to verify/debunk this is carbon-dating. If you have some organic artifact and date it as being e.g. 1500yrs old, yet it should according to that theory be a lot younger (1200yrs since it's apparently about a 300yr timespan), wouldn't this blow up the whole theory? Layman speaking here, just wondering :) 80.121.49.14 05:07, 26 June 2008 (EDT)

Certainly, but the problem is that these people and their supporters usually either don't care or simply reject circumstances that don't fit with their theories. For instance, Fomenko has rejected dating methods like carbon dating or dendrochronology because of the many inaccuracies that do exist in the methods. However, he completely ignores the fact that you usually use more than one method to verify the results.

Fundamentally, the problem is that most of these theories are based in political or other agendas, so trying to argue against them on the usual scientific or academic grounds won't get you very far. --AKjeldsen^{Potential fundamentalist!} 05:53, 26 June 2008 (EDT)