Paradigm Revolutionary: Dr Immanuel Velikovsky

A law is but a deduction from experience and experiment, and therefore laws must conform with historical facts, not facts with law"

---Immanuel Velikovsky

I consider Immanuel Velikovsky to be one of the most influential minds in the last few centuries. He was a genius on par with Einstein, and a revolutionary thinker. It is however, unfortunate that many are completely unaware of this man. 

Velikovsky was a Russian born scholar who at a younger age attained a medical degree and then went on to study and practice aspects of Psychology under Freud's first pupil Wilhelm Stekel. Throughout his early life he became very much interested in the Jewish literature, mythology and biblical origins of his earlier religious familial faith. He eventually moved to the U.S.A where he first produced a book about the Oedipus narrative in conjunction with Psychological theory. Studying old manuscripts set him off along academic paths of comparative mythology - to which he would eventually write his first heavily controversial book "Worlds in Collision"

Worlds in Collision quickly became a number 1 bestseller in the U.S, and its audience of academics became deeply divided. Quite a few ridiculed his ideas without ever having read his work, while a separate group of intellectuals hailed him as a revolutionary thinker. Later on this became known as the Velikovsky Affair - and many drew parallels to persecution of Newton's ideas. 

Why was this book so controversial?

For the first time a scholar used multiple disciplines, drawing on historical records to paint a picture of modern humanity.  This mostly angered the geologists and archaeologists of the day who saw his interdisciplinary approach as meaningless, of not pseudo scientific-work. Geological inquiry has no place for historical, cultural connections - and even archaeological. Using a myriad of cultural texts from around the world as a basis, Velikovsky lays out a framework in which to explain those based on modern scientific data. The real reason this caused an uprising was simply because it threatened the very basis of Geological and Archaeological inquiry; the doctrine of Uniformity.

 

"The tradition of many peoples persist that seas were torn apart and their water heaped high and thrown upon the continents. In order to establish that these traditions refer to one and the same event, or at least to an event of the same order, we must keep to this guiding sequence: the great tide followed a disturbance in the motion of the earth...The Chinese annals say that in the time of Emperor Yahou the sun did not go down for ten days, the world was in flames and in "their vast extent the waters over topped the great heights".

The traditions of the people of Peru tell that for a period of time equal to five days and five nights the sun was not in the sky, and then the ocean left the shore and with a terrible din broke over the continent; the entire surface of the earth was changed in a catastrophe. The Choctaw Indians of Oklahoma relate: "The earth was plunged in darkness for a long time - a bright light appeared in the north, "but it was mountain-high-waves, rapidly coming nearer." The Midrashim contain the following description: "The waters were piled up on to the height of the sixteen hundred miles, and they could be seen by all the nations on the earth."  (Velikovsky: 57, Worlds in Collision)

His central thesis was that in our not-so-distant past a giant comet must have swung close to the Earth, playing havoc on life and eventually re-instating itself as the planet venus  The impact of this event would not only have caused devastation and witness accounts on Earth but would have left traces within our neighboring planets as well. Of course, long after Velikovsky passed on many of his theories about planetary bodies came true .

On 14 October 1953, Immanuel Velikovsky, addressing the Forum of the Graduate College of Princeton University in a lecture entitled "Worlds in Collision in the Light of Recent Finds in Archaeology, Geology and Astronomy: Refuted or Verified?," concluded the lecture as follows: "The planet Jupiter is cold, yet its gases are in motion. It appears probable to me that it sends out radio noises as do the sun and the stars. I suggest that this be investigated."

Soon after that date, the text of the lecture was deposited with each of us [it is printed as supplement to Velikovsky's Earth in Upheaval (Doubleday, 1955)]. Eight months later, in June 1954, Velikovsky, in a letter, requested Albert Einstein to use his influence to have Jupiter surveyed for radio emission. The letter, with Einstein's marginal notes commenting on this proposal, is before us. Ten more months passed, and on 5 April 1955 B. F. Burke and K. L. Franklin of the Carnegie Institution announced the chance detection of strong radio signals emanating from Jupiter. They recorded the signals for several weeks before they correctly identified the source.

This discovery came as something of a surprise because radio astronomers had never expected a body as cold as Jupiter to emit radio waves (1).

In 1960 V. Radhakrishnah of India and J. A. Roberts of Australia, working at California Institute of Technology, established the existence of a radiation belt encompassing Jupiter "giving 1014 times as much radio energy as the Van Allen belts around the earth."

On 5 December 1956, through the kind services of H. H. Hess, chairman of the department of geology of Princeton University, Velikovsky submitted a memorandum to the U. S. National Committee for the (planned) IGY in which he suggested the existence of a terrestrial magnetosphere reaching the moon. Receipt of the memorandum was acknowledged by E. O. Hulburt for the Committee. The magnetosphere was discovered in 1958 by Van Allen.

In the last chapter of his Worlds in Collision (1950), Velikovsky stated that the surface of Venus must be very hot, even though in 1950 the temperature of the cloud surface of Venus was known to be -25°C on the day and night sides alike.

n 1954 N. A. Kozyrev (2) observed an emission spectrum from the night side of Venus but ascribed it to discharges in the upper layers of its atmosphere. He calculated that the temperature of the surface of Venus must be +30 C; somewhat higher values were found earlier by Adel and Herzberg. As late as 1959, V. A. Firsoff arrived at a figure of +17.5°C for the mean surface temperature of Venus, only a little above the mean annual temperature of the earth (+14.2°C) (3).

However, by 1961 it became known that the surface temperature of Venus is "almost 600 degrees [K]" (4). F. D. Drake described this discovery as "a surprise ... in a field in which the fewest surprises were expected." "We would have expected a temperature only greater than that of the earth ... Sources of internal heating [radioactivity] will not produce an enhanced surface temperature. Cornell H. Mayer writes (5), "All the observations are consistent with a temperature of almost 600 degrees," and admits that "the temperature is much higher than anyone would have predicted."

Source

"Immanuel Velikovsky concluded from his extensive interdisciplinary research that the planet Venus was remembered from the time of the dawn of civilization as a brilliant cometary body. While there is a wealth of literal sources to draw upon, when it comes to the pictorial evidence it isn't as forthcoming. No images can be conclusively identified as actually representing Venus in cometary form, a situation that essentially shouldn't exist. After all, it stands to reason that it was naked eye observations that inspired the myths. So, at the very least the imagery should be equal to or analogous to the literal sources – but this clearly isn't the case....."

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