Once one has experienced the desperation with which clever and conciliatory men of science react to the demand for a change in the thought pattern, one can only be amazed that such revolutions in science have actually been possible at all.
Werner Heisenberg
I believe we must look for salvation from the non-specialists, amateurs and interdisciplinary thinkersthose who form judgments on the general thrust of the evidence, those who are skeptical about any explanation, particularly official ones, and above all are tolerant of other people's theories.
Halton Arp
In the earlier section dealing with evolution, we saw that by the late nineteenth century the doctrine of uniformitarianism had been established as the officially recognized mechanism of geological and biological change. Ideas of catastrophism, previously unquestioned, were quickly relegated to obscurity. They carried too much suggestion of divine intervention and biblical retribution, which didn't fit with the new world view. Evidence that had long been accepted as pointing clearly to the occurrence of immense cataclysms in the course of Earth's history disappeared from the classrooms and the textbooks to be replaced by lyrical accounts of Nature rendering its works insensibly but tirelessly over huge spans of time. And the same spirit extended to the realm of astronomy, where the regularities of celestial motions were no longer seen as a choreography of God, but as the working of a vast, endlessly repeating, cosmic machine obeying the mechanical lawfulness revealed by Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and their followers. Although rigorous observation had been limited to just a couple of centuries, the reigning philosophy of gradualism put no restraint on extrapolating the current conditions backward, creating a picture of the past that remained essentially unchanged. The possibility was never seriously entertained that even back in epochs long before humans existed, the skies might have been different in any significant way from the ones we see today.
As a teenager I was enthralled by the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky. But when the scientific authorities which at that time I didn't question did such a superb job of misrepresenting his work and dismissed him as a crank, I largely forgot about the subject. It was not until forty or so years later, in the 1990s, that I came across a remarkable book by Charles Ginenthal entitled Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky, 87 collecting together findings from the space missions and later developments in astronomy, geology, archeology, ancient history, and other areas, that were consistent with Velikovsky's ideas and basic theory, while refuting just about everything that had been said by the experts who vilified him. This was enough to revive my interest in the subject of catastrophism generally.