The reactions after release of Earth in Upheaval were more restrained, possibly because some were beginning to feel that things had gone too far for the good of the professional image the first time. Others no doubt hoped that if they ignored Velikovsky he might just go away. But a big part of the reason could have been that an embarrassing number of his predictions were beginning to be shown as correct.
When Worlds in Collision was published, four Yale University professors had collaborated in preparing a rebuttal in the American Journal of Science, where one of them ridiculed the suggestion that the Mesoamerican civilization appeared to be much older than conventional history allowed. Five years later, the National Geographical Society announced: "Atomic science has proved the ancient civilizations of Mexico to be some 1,000 years older than had been believed." 97 The chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution declared this to be the most important archeological discovery in recent history.
Another of the Yale critics scorned Velikovsky's suggestion that petroleum might have a cosmic origin. Two years later, in 1952, P. V. Smith reported in Science (October 24) the "surprising fact" that oil from recently deposited sediments along the Gulf of Mexico could be only thousands of years old. Hydrocarbons were subsequently found in the composition of some types of meteorites. A smallish carbonaceous chondrite asteroidsay, around ten kilometers in diameteris estimated to contain a trillion tons of them. 98 In 1960, Professor A. T. Wilson of Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, produced high-molecular-weight hydrocarbons by electric discharges in Jupiter-like gases and suggested that terrestrial petroleum might have come from elsewherea theme that others have taken up since. 99 Both he and Professor W. Libby, chemist at the University of California, speculated that oil might exist on the Moon. By the early 1960s, neon and argon were repeatedly being found in meteorites, too.
In April of the same year as Earth in Upheaval was published, 1955, scientists from the Carnegie Institution startled their audience at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society by announcing the chance detection of unexpected radio emanations from Jupiter, which they had recorded for several weeks before identifying the source. When a Doubleday editor wrote, calling attention to Velikovsky's anticipating just such a finding, one of them replied that even Velikovsky was entitled to a "near miss once in a while." The full extent of the radiation belt encompassing Jupiter, a hundred trillion times more powerful than Earth's, was established in 1960.
Dr. Harry Hess, head of the Department of Geology at Princeton University, who had always been sympathetic toward Velikovsky's theories, submitted a memorandum to the U.S. National Committee in December 1956, proposing as part of the planned agenda for the International Geophysical Year a search for the extended region of terrestrial magnetic influence as Velikovsky had suggested. The Van Allen Belts were discovered in 1958 and featured as one of the high points of the program. In 1960 the Pioneer V space probe was launched, and after it had been in solar orbit for six weeks NASA called a press conference to announce that "In one exciting week, man has learned more about the near reaches of space that surround the earth than the sum of his knowledge over the last 50 years. . . . [A] fantastic amount of cosmic traffic (hot gaseous clouds, deadly rays, bands of electricity) rushes by at high speed, circles, crisscrosses, and collides." 100 The tail of the Earth's magnetosphere was later measured as extending beyond the orbit of the Moon.
There was also news from Venus. As late as 1959, many astronomers still maintained that because of the great reflectivity of its cloud cover its surface temperature would be little different from Earth's, despite its closer orbit to the Sun. However, in April 1961, radio astronomers announced that the figure had to be at least 600ºF. In 1963, after analysis of data from the Mariner 2 probe, the measured value turned out to be 800ºF. At about the same time, radiometric measurements by the U.S. Naval Observatory and the Goldstone Tracking Station in California showed Venus to have a very slow retrograde rotation, making it unique among the planets and suggesting something unusual about its history. Some astronomers wondered if it might have been created separately from the others.
Further results from Mariner 2 were interpreted as indicating atmospheric condensation and polymerization into heavy molecules at temperatures around 200ºF, leading to the conclusion that Venus's atmosphere must contain heavy hydrocarbons and possibly more complex organic compounds. Lloyd Motz of Columbia, who had supported Velikovsky before, along with Princeton physicist V. Bargmann, wrote a joint letter to Science drawing attention to Velikovsky's priority in predicting these seemingly unrelated facts about the Solar System and urged that his whole thesis be objectively reexamined. When the letter was published, Velikovsky submitted a paper showing that the points brought out in the letter were just a few of many his books raised, that had been supported by independent research. The paper was returned unread. Instead, Science published a facetious letter from a reader stating that "the accidental presence of one or two good apples does not redeem a spoiled barrelful." Or a barrelful of sour grapes, maybe?
The theoretical front was seeing some interesting developments also. One of Velikovsky's suggestions that had been greeted with derision was that electromagnetic forces might play a part in celestial dynamics as well as gravity, and that astronomical bodies could be affected by acquiring electrical charge during their encounters. At a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in 1952, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin presented a paper taking Velikovsky to task on selected biblical quotations, but which was itself riddled with misrepresentations. 101 Velikovsky, who was in the audience, came forward to give a rebuttal and was warmly received. But when he requested that his remarks be reproduced along with Gaposchkin's in the society's Proceedings, he was refused.
Appended to Gaposchkin's paper, however, was a "quantitative refutation of Velikovsky's wild hypotheses" by Donald H. Menzel, also of Harvard. To show how preposterous Velikovsky's hypothesis was, Menzel demonstrated that to contribute ten percent of its gravitational attraction on the Earth, the Sun would need a charge of 1019 volts, whereas he calculated it was incapable or retaining anything greater than 1800 volts. (He also showed that the sudden acquisition of such a charge would involve a supply of more energy than the Sun radiates in a thousand years, which was neither here nor there since Velikovsky had said nothing about its being acquired suddenly.)
Then in 1960, Professor V. A. Bailey, professor of physics at the University of Sydney, Australia, who was not familiar with Velikovsky's work, announced that the magnitudes of five different known astronomical phenomena could be explained by the single hypothesis that a star like the Sun carries a net negative charge. Bailey's figures for making this work gave a surface potential of 1019 voltsprecisely that which Menzel had used to show how wacky Velikovsky was. Menzel wrote to Bailey pointing out what he perceived as an error and asked that Bailey revoke his theory since it wasn't helping the American scientists' campaign to discredit Velikovsky. Bailey took exception to the suggestion and in turn uncovered an arithmetical slip in Menzel's calculations that invalidated Menzel's whole argument. Menzel duly published a correction, but without acknowledging that it demolished his widely publicized anti-Velikovsky claim.
With regard to the radio emissions from Jupiter, Menzel wrote that since scientists generally didn't accept the theory of Worlds in Collision, "any seeming verification of Velikovsky's predictions is pure chance." 102 He dismissed the prediction of the high temperature of Venus on the grounds that Velikovsky hadn't supplied a figure but said only that it would be hot, which was a relative termliquid air, for example, being "hot" relative to liquid helium.
Velikovsky's suggestion of electrical interaction as an agency for arresting the motion of the Earth and circularizing the orbit of Venus had been scoffed at by the eminences because they insisted that the bodies of the Solar System were not charged and the space between them electromagnetically inert. Both these assertions had been shown to be wrong. 1960 was also the year when Professor André Danjon, director of the Paris Observatory, reported to l'Académie des Sciences that following an unusually large solar flare, the length of the day suddenly increased by 0.85 milliseconds, which he ascribed to electromagnetic forces induced by the flare. Thereafter, as the charge acquired by the Earth leaked away into the conductive medium afforded by the recently discovered solar wind, the Earth's rotation recovered at the rate of 3.7 microseconds every 24 hours. 103
We saw earlier how fiercely the entrenched priesthood resisted Hans Alfvén's theories about space being an electrically active mediumfrom one of the club, who later received a Nobel Prize for his work in celestial electrodynamics. It isn't difficult to imagine how they must have felt about being upstaged by a scholar in ancient history and classical languages, who was not only asking questions that they themselves should have been asking long before, but moving in on the turf and coming up with some good answers.
Needless to say, the proposal of Venus erupting out of Jupiter, and that the Greeks hadn't imagined it or made it all up, sent the Establishment into a frenzy. Everybody knew that all the planets had been formed at the same time billions of years ago. The two prevalent mechanisms doing the rounds in the fifties were the tidal theory, going back to Laplace, in which the planets had condensed from a blob pulled off the Sun by a close-passing star, and the more recent model of accretion from a contracting nebular disk.
However, in 1960 the president of the Royal Astronomical Society in Britain, W. H. McCrea, rocked the applecart with a theoretical analysis showing that neither of these models would work, since planetary formation within the orbit of Jupiter by either process would be disrupted by its tidal effects. 104 The following year, the British cosmologist Raymond. A. Lyttleton concluded from a fluid-dynamic study of Jupiter's core that an object of its size and estimated accretion rate, rotating at such a speed, would periodically become unstable and assume the form of an ovoid rotating about its short axis. The ovoid would elongate into an asymmetrical dumbbell and eventually fission to shed excess mass. Most of this ejected amountup to 10 percent the mass of the original bodywould be expelled from the Solar System. But lesser drops torn out in the process could be captured by the Sun and have formed the inner planets. Thus the only primordial members of the planetary system would be the gas giants. 105 And as we saw previously, Alfvén also concluded (in 1963 106) from considerations of angular momentum that the gas giants must have been formed before the terrestrial planets. A doctoral thesis presented in 1969 doubted if planets could form beyond the orbit of Saturn and suggested that the planets now out there had been propelled by encounters with others. 107
These days, the shortcomings of the accretion theory are more widely acknowledged, and it is permissible to propose alternatives. Conference papers discussing the origination of planets and other objects through fission from larger ones are commonplace and receive due consideration. Impact theories are in vogue following identification of the Cretaceous event believed to have caused the extinctions that included the dinosaurs, the most recent proposal for the formation of the Moon attributing it to ejection from the Earth following a strike by a possibly Mars-size body. But no citation ever acknowledges Velikovsky as the first whose ideas had departed from the idealized, endlessly repeating Laplacian machine. 108
The Earth itself had also departed from the picture of gradual, nonthreatening change that had persisted since the days of Lyell and Darwin. It had been argued that pole shifts and crustal movements of the magnitude that Velikovsky described would have left no stalactites or stalagmites unbroken in caves, yet it was knownaccording to accepted theorythat such structures were far older than the dates he talked about. But in 1962, in the Gnome Cavern, New Mexico, to the astonishment of geologists, stalactites had grown within one year of the nuclear test explosion there. A newspaper dispatch reported, "All nature's processes have been speeded up a billionfold." (Within five years of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington, strata deposited in new-formed canyons had hardened into rock. With the presence of a fine-grained ingredient to act as a binder, the process resembles the setting of cement and can occur very rapidly.)
The modern picture of plate tectonicslaughed at in the 1920s when Alfred Wegener first put forward his ideas that continents movedwas coming together in the mid fifties, with new evidence appearing in the journals just about every month for magnetic reversals, shifting poles, ice sheets covering what had once been tropics, mountain tops that had been seabeds, and slabs of crust rifting, separating, and colliding like grease patches on cold soup. Velikovsky's sympathizer, Harry Hess, was one of the leading figures in these developments. (Current theory still assumes millions-of-years time scales, arrived at by extrapolating backward the rates of plate movement observed today. My own guess is that these will turn out to be the cooled-down remnant of processes that once operated much faster.)
Cores from the ocean bottoms were read as testifying to prodigious falls of meteorites, dust, and ash over enormous areas. Claude Schaeffer of College de France, unaware at the time of Velikovsky's work, concluded in a study of archeological strata that the ancient East, as documented for every excavation from Troy to the Caucasus, Persia, Palestine, and Syria, underwent immense natural paroxysms unknown in the modern experience of seismology. Five times between the third and first millennia b.c., cultures disappeared, empires collapsed, cities were buried, climates altered. 109
Rejected Call for Reappraisal
Eric Larrabee, whose original preview article in Harpers in 1950 of Worlds in Collision could be said to have started the whole thing off, wrote again thirteen years later, in the August 1963 issue of the same magazine, a piece called "Scientists in Collision," citing the new discoveries in astronomy, space science, geology, and geophysics that supported Velikovsky's case and calling for the establishment to reappraise its position.
"Science itself," he wrote, "even while most scientists have considered his case to be closed, has been heading in Velikovsky's direction. Proposals which seemed so shocking when he made them are now commonplace. . . . There is scarcely one of Velikovsky's central ideasas long as it was taken separately and devoid of its implicationswhich has not since been propounded in all seriousness by a scientist of repute."
The responses were fast and ireful, but for the most part repeated all the old fallacies. On the subject of conducting plasmas and magnetic fields in interplanetary space, the tune changed to "we knew all that before Velikovsky" (maybe because of publication of Alfvén's work?). The debate carried on through the August, October, December 1963, and January 1964 issues of Harpers. Larrabee's performance in taking it upon himself to answer the opposition was described by one commentator as "a classic example of the demolition of a scientist's arguments by a non-scientist." The "scientific" side was reduced to arguing that since nonscientists did not understand scientific issues and the scientific method, they should be restrained from debating in a public forum. 110
In the same period, Velikovsky, feeling optimistic that the new findings might have earned him a more considered hearing by now, prepared an article entitled "Venus, a Youthful Planet," which Harry Hess agreed to recommend to the American Philosophical Society for publishingthe same organization whose publications committee in 1952 had rejected Velikovsky's corrections of Cecilia Payne Gapschkin's misquotations in its Proceedings. This time the committee was split into two belligerent camps who argued for something like six months. In January 1964, the decision was taken not to publish Velikovsky's paper.
An article entitled "The Politics of Science and Dr. Velikovsky," documenting the scientific community's treatment of the whole affair and accusing it of conspiracy and suppression, appeared in the September 1963 issue of American Behavioral Scientist, requiring a second printing even though the initial run had been unusually large in anticipation. The response of the readership, composed mainly of specialists in fields that Velikovsky's work hadn't touched upon, was predominantly favorable. A number of sociologists felt the ABS account should be required reading in social science courses. Professor G. A. Lundberg of the University of Washington wrote, "[T]he A.A.A.S., not to mention individual scientists and groups, must now prepare a detailed answer. What is really at issue are the mores governing the reception of new scientific ideas on the part of the established spokesmen for science." 111
Since the issue was essentially one of scientific ethics, the seemingly natural choice for a vehicle to pursue the matter in was the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which prided itself on being a medium for expression of such issues. In a later letter to Harry Hess, the editor of the Bulletin, Eugene Rabinowitch, acknowledged the reawakening of interest in Velikovsky's theories and alluded to the situation as requiring "remedial action," i.e., rallying to the defense of the threatened citadels. The ensuing piece, "Velikovsky Rides Again" (Bulletin, April 1964), was jeering and uncivil, employing all the devices seen when the earlier outcry was raised, of unfounded charges, misrepresentation, and dogmatically presenting received opinion as established fact. The writer given the assignment was unfamiliar with the fields of ancient languages and Egyptology in which he chose to attack Velikovskyand even, apparently, with the elementary French needed to read one of Velikovsky's sources. But these were areas that typical readers of a journal like the Bulletin would have to take on trust, and the tone met with satisfied and often eager approval.
One protector of the faith sent a copy of the Bulletin article to Moses Hadas, Jay Professor of Greek at Columbia University, who had remarked in an earlier review that Velikovsky appeared to be approaching vindication. Doubtless to illuminate him as to the error of his ways, Hadas was told that he should find the piece "of interest and perhaps amusing." But the ploy backfired. Hadas replied that he had no opinion about Velikovsky's astronomical theories "but I know that he is not dishonest. What bothered me was the violence of the attack on him: if his theories were absurd, would they not have been exposed as such in time without a campaign of vilification? One after another the reviews misquoted him and then attacked the misquotation. . . . [Regarding the Bulletin article] It is his critic, not Velikovsky, who is uninformed and rash." 112
Eric Larrabee was promised an opportunity to reply in the Bulletin, but on meeting the stated deadline he was informed that space was not available. When challenged, Rabinowitch affirmed that the matter should be resolved in the "spirit of scientific argumentation" and agreed that since the Bulletin's article had made claims involving Hebrew and Egyptian paleographic and philological evidence, it should devote space to material disputing them. Velikovsky, however, would not consent to entering into such a debate, since in his view the author of the piece had amply demonstrated incompetence in those subjects. Instead, he proposed publication of "Venus, a Youthful Planet," which Hess had again agreed to submit. This was turned down on the grounds that the Bulletin was "not a magazine for scientific controversies." But wasn't that the reason why it had been chosen as a forum in the first place? The article was returned unread with a letter from Rabinowitch stating that he wasn't qualified and didn't have the time to study Velikovsky's books. But he knew enough about the absence of dogmatism in modern science to trust the pronouncements of qualified experts. As Epictetus observed almost two thousand years go, "A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows."
The summer of 1965 saw the release by Delta of paperback editions of Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval, provoking another round of reactions along the same general lines that had been seen before. One reviewer, ridiculing the former book, flaunted his own ignorance of the content of the latter by declaring blithely that the alleged events couldn't have happened since "animal life went through the fateful year of 1500 b.c. without any disturbance." Science and Scientific American both refused to accept advertisements for the Delta editions.
An interesting twist to the suppression or ignoring of inconvenient facts was added by Sky & Telescope, a journal for amateur astronomers published by Harvard Observatory. Their report on the findings of Mariner 2, a summary from the book Mariner, Mission to Venus (1963), by the staff of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, deleted references to (a) Venus's retrograde motion; (b) an interpretation of the clouds as consisting of condensed hydrocarbons held in oily suspension; (c) absence of water and the possibility of small lakes of molten metal; and (d) the paltriness of sunlight, if any, finding its way down through the fifteen-mile-thick cloud blanket (effectively demolishing the notion of a "runaway greenhouse effect" that had been cobbled together in an attempt to explain the temperature). It could, of course, have been coincidence that these were precisely the points that lent the most support to Velikovsky's contentions. As Larrabee had commented in his 1963 Harpers piece, science itself continued to unfold at its own pace regardless of what some scientists tried to make of it.
Theoretical studies showed that the tidal pumping effect of a large, plastic, plasma object orbiting in a strong gravitational field would convert orbital to thermal energy and was consistent with the rapid circularization of Venus's orbit. 113 (Einstein was of the opinion that Velikovskian orbits could arise through purely gravitational influence, although it would require some fortuitous coincidences.) It had also been shown that a combination of electromagnetic and gravitational forces on the scale envisioned for a Venus encounter was quite capable of producing an arrest of apparent celestial motions as seen from Earth without violent deceleration by tilting the Earth's axis and producing a temporary transfer of momentum from axial spin to a precessional wobble. 114
From Jupiter: In April 1964, radio astronomers measured a sudden change in the rotation rate, speculated as caused by interaction of its intense electromagnetic field with fields permeating the Solar System.
From the Moon: The Explorer 18 satellite measured a lunar magnetosphere extending at least 68,000 miles. Unexpected volcanic and seismic activity was detected on the Moonsupposedly a tectonically dead body for billions of years. Dome structures were identified all over the surface that seemed to be bubbles of once-molten magma that had failed to burstraising the question of how many other crater formations might be the marks of bubbles that had. The first tests of lunar rock brought back by the Apollo astronauts yielded unexpected amounts of neon and argon. The solar wind was excluded as a source, yet the elements had to have come from the outside, since the concentration was found to be proportional to the area of the soil grains, not the volume. Hydrocarbons were also found. The Apollo 11 crew observed peculiar glazed regions where the surface appeared to have been molten too recently for erosion of the reflective surface by meteorite and dust infall. Experiments performed by the Apollo 15 team measured a temperature gradient in the surface layers indicating heat flow from the interior, which surprised scientists.
From Mars: In 1965 Mariner 4 had shocked scientists by finding Mars to be more Moon-like than Earth-like. By the early seventies, pictures from Mariner 9 were showing large surface tracts of lava flows crossed by faults and fissures, as well as apparently recent water channels and runoff patterns covering huge areas. The motion of Mars exhibited peculiarities that could be explained by its path being disturbed at some time. From studies of the distribution of mass and angular momentum across the Solar System, it appeared that Mars had lost much of its spin momentum, rotating in slightly over twenty-four hours against the eight hours that calculation said it should exhibit, but had gained far more in orbital momentum.
And from the Earth itself: A paper in Nature in 1971 115 suggested interaction between Earth and an external body as the cause of magnetic pole reversals and claimed that tektitesa type of small, glass stonewere deposited on Earth at the time of the last reversal. This had previously been believed to have occurred 700,000 years ago, but later studies of ancient hearthstones and pottery brought it down first to 12,500 years ago, and then to the eighth century b.c.
Velikovsky had been trying for over a decade to have dating tests performed to check his theories of Egyptian chronology but met evasion and obstruction. Eventually, the radiocarbon laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania determined dates for samples of wood from the tomb of Tutenkhamen as being 200 to 300 years younger than the fourteenth century b.c. that accepted chronology assigns. Velikovsky had placed Tutenkhamen in the ninth century. The reported dating fell midway between the two, but it doesn't present a problem for Velikovsky's revised chronology because the objects that the samples were taken from could have been fashioned from wood that was older. On the other hand, they could hardly have been made from trees that grew centuries later, which means that the conventional system can only admit a discrepancy.
There are other reasons why wood can yield incorrectly high radiocarbon dates. Shorter-lived items should be more reliable. In a 1964 letter to Dr. Elizabeth Ralph at the University of Pennsylvania, Velikovsky had stated that he expected short-lived items from Tutenkhamen's tomb would give figures around 840 b.c. The British Museum finally reported tests on reed and palm nut kernels as giving 846 b.c. and 899 b.c. respectively (designated by the Museum as BM 642A and BM 642B). Despite an assurance that these results would be published "shortly," they weren't. But they were discussed in the May 1972 issue of the journal Pensée. A Dr. Van Oosterhout of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the University of Delft, the Netherlands, wrote to Pensée in 1973, saying that he could find no details in the published radiocarbon data from the British Museum and asking for additional information. After follow-up and questioning, an official of the British Museum admitted that results deviating substantially from the expected values were often discarded without being published. Another letter from the Museum to Van Oosterhout denied that tests on materials from the tomb had ever been performed at all. 116