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Science in Convulsion:
The Reactions

I always think it's pathetic when writers resort to phrases like "Words cannot describe . . ." It's the writer's job, after all, to find words that do describe. But the reaction of the scientific community to Worlds in Collision came pretty close. "Vituperative," "vitriolic," "hysterical," "irrational" jostle for consideration. Critics vied with each other in the shrillness of their denunciations.

Word of the impending release by the Macmillan Company had circulated in the publishing trade, and a preview article entitled "The Day the Sun Stood Still" appeared in the in January 1950 issue of Harpers, which sold out in a few days. The following month, Readers Digest featured a popularization that interpreted Velikovsky as proving the assertions of the Old Testament scientifically. Velikovsky had also contracted with Collier's Magazine to produce what he understood would be a three-part serialization, but the manuscripts that he received for approval were condensations, and so sensationalized without examination of the scholarship behind the work that he threatened public disavowal unless they were severely revised. Eventually the first two appeared; the third was abandoned.

On the strength of these articles, the storm from the academic and scientific camp, and the media who sought their opinions, began. The Dallas News thought Worlds In Collision was a Russian propaganda ploy. The Communist press saw it as a sure sign of the dying of bourgeois society. One British intellectual felt it was a move by U.S. warmongers to soften the world up for the atomic war they were preparing to launch. Any suggestion that there could anything worthwhile to learn from prescientific texts that talked about gods and dragons was an anathema, never mind—horror of horrors—quoting the Bible! (even though Velikovsky used it purely as a historical record, and then only when it was corroborated by other sources). The work, the chorus insisted, was spurious, uninformed, and utterly without scientific merit.

Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard College Observatory, wrote twice to Macmillan, expressing astonishment that they would consider venturing into the "Black Arts," threatening to cut of all relations with the company (Macmillan owned a substantial and profitable textbook division), and insinuating that their reputation might be severely damaged if they went ahead. The February 25 issue of Science News Letter, a publication directed by Shapley, printed a condemnation of Worlds in Collision by authorities in the fields of archeology, oriental studies, anthropology, and geology, as well as astronomy—the last topic spoken for by Shapley himself. The book was only then going to press, so not one of the critics had actually seen it. Somewhat taken aback, the president of the Macmillan Company submitted the manuscript to three independent arbiters and decided to abide by their recommendation. Their vote was to go ahead with publication, and the book was released on schedule in April. Although the names of the arbiters were never officially disclosed, one of them later identified himself as the chairman of the Department of Physics at New York University and confirmed that he had voted in favor.

Meanwhile, the attacks had intensified, spurred by an article in the Reporter written by Shapley's associate at Harvard, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, based on the January Harpers article and circulated to scientists, science editors, and publishers. It insisted, essentially, that electromagnetic phenomena can have no effect in space, where processes are purely mechanical, and the events described in Worlds in Collision were impossible. The gist of this was cited in the March 25 issue of Science News Letter as a "Retort to Velikovsky," who as yet had not been heard from.

Gordon Atwater, curator of the Hayden Planetarium and chairman of the Department of Astronomy of the American Museum of Natural History, had read the manuscript and recommended publication before the original Macmillan contract was signed. When he received a letter from Otto Struve, director of the Yerkes Observatory, requesting that he change his position, he failed to appreciate the situation and replied that while he didn't accept all of Velikovsky's claims, he felt the work had merit. Accordingly, he was preparing a favorable review of the book for This Week magazine and planning a program at the planetarium depicting the events that it described. A week later, Atwater was summarily fired from both his positions and instructed to vacate his office immediately. Attempts were also made to suppress his review in the April 2 issue of This Week, but failed. However, the credentials that appeared alongside his name, above an article pleading for open-mindedness in evaluating the new theory, were already history.

An intended review in the New York Herald Tribune, also scheduled for April 2, was pulled, and instead readers found a denunciation by Struve with a reference to Payne-Gaposchkin stating that observations of Venus extended back at least five hundred years before the Exodus, "thus refuting the absurd idea that a comet had turned into a planet." But Velikovsky had given no date for the ejection of Venus by Jupiter, saying only that it had occurred at some earlier time. And as Velikovsky had pointed out in his book, the Babylonian tablets cited by Gaposchkin ("Venus Tables of Ammizaduga") describe Venus as exhibiting erratic motions that have baffled translators and astronomical commentators ever since their discovery. So even if the tablets do date from early in the second millennium b.c., what they show is that Venus was moving enigmatically at that time, in a way quite unlike a planet. This was a preview of the kind of distortion that was to become typical. The New York Times Book Review, again April 2, followed Gaposchkin in accusing Velikovsky of ignoring or suppressing the Ammizaduga tablets completely. But they couldn't have reviewed it very carefully. Velikovsky devotes over four pages to the tablets, quoting the complete texts for observations from five successive years and discussing the opinions of seven orientalists and astronomers who had studied them. 95 

In the following months, astronomers descended from their telescopes in droves to put down the heresy. Newspapers across the country were bombarded with abusive letters, frequently syndicated to achieve better coverage. Ignoring Velikovsky's suggestion that tilting the axis of a rotating body could produce the visual effect of an arrested or even retrogressing Sun, the director of one observatory castigated him for not being bothered by "the elementary fact that if the earth were stopped, inertia would cause Joshua and his companions to fly off into space at a speed of nine hundred miles an hour" (also brought up by Gaposchkin). But the argument is disingenuous. Even if Velikovsky is read as conceding that the Earth stopped, he makes no mention of the rate at which it decelerated. If the Earth under present conditions were to halt its rotation totally in six hours, the deceleration experienced at the equator would be the same as a car traveling at sixty miles per hour taking twenty minutes to stop. Stopping the car in an easy span of thirty seconds would be equivalent to halting the Earth in a cool 8.7 minutes—not enough to strain a seat belt, never mind throw people off the planet.

Nevertheless, many writers and reviewers were enthusiastic, as, evidently, was the general public, for Worlds in Collision topped the bestsellers list for twenty successive weeks. But letters continued to come in to Macmillan from scientists demanding that they cease publishing the book, and some large institutions were refusing to see Macmillan salesmen. One astronomer dismissed the book as nothing but lies, on the same page declaring that he had not read and never would read it. Macmillan backed down and persuaded Velikovsky to accept a deal they had worked out to transfer the rights to Doubleday, who had no textbook division and were immune to pressure and blackmail in that direction. All remaining copies of the Macmillan edition were burned, and the editor who had accepted the book was fired after twenty-five years with the company.

The campaign continued. Gaposchkin attacked Velikovsky again in the June 1950 issue of Popular Astronomy, the essence of the argument being that his claims couldn't be true because they violated undemonstrable dogmatisms that antedated him and therefore took precedence. In an article in Isis that was widely reproduced and circulated, Professor Otto Neugebauer of Brown University, a specialist in Babylonian and Greek astronomy, accused Velikovsky of altering quoted source material to suit his case—specifically, that he had changed a figure of 3º 13' to 33º 13'. When Velikovsky protested to the editor that his figure was correct and that the 33º 13' figure was Neugebauer's substitution, not his, the professor dismissed the incident as "simply a misprint of no concern." 96 

But it didn't change his fundamental position, which was that since Babylonian astronomical tables from before the seventh century b.c. cannot be reconciled with the celestial motions seen today, they must have been compiled in disregard for actual observations. In other words, the people who not only understood the number systems and astronomical procedures that we still use today, but who developed them, couldn't have seen what they say they saw because it contradicts what boils down to faith in a dogma.

There were some sympathetic voices, to be sure, such as Walter Adams, director of the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories, who complimented Velikovsky on the accuracy of his astronomical material although not agreeing with all of it; Professor Lloyd Motz, astronomer at Columbia University, who was interested in the new proposals for celestial mechanics; and S. K. Vsekhsviatsky, director of Kiev University, who corresponded extensively and cited Velikovsky in support of his own views. But in the main the general pattern continued of critics repeating the same worn fallacies, citing misquotes of their own making, and academic journals publishing attacks on Velikovsky's person but not his arguments, and then refusing him space to respond. This systematic disinformation left the majority of scientists with the impression that Velikovsky had been demolished by those who knew better, and that no answers existed to the only version of the debate that they were permitted to hear.

As noted earlier, the first volume of Velikovsky's revisions to ancient history, Ages in Chaos, followed in 1952, this time producing what the Herald Tribune described as "howls of anguish" among historians. The scientific press did not devote as much space to analyzing this work, but a measure of the criticism and its quality can be gained from one example, where the only fault that one professor could allege was that Velikovsky had mistaken the cuneiform plural sign mesh for the name of the Moabite king, Mesha. However, Velikovsky twice calls attention to the fact that in several instances the normal reading cannot apply, since the grammatical construction definitely alludes to an individual. Further commentators repeated the professor's erroneous claim, inviting the suspicion that they had read the critics but not the actual work that they purported to review.

One person who did take notice of Velikovsky's theories was Einstein. According to his secretary, Helen Dukas, just before his death in 1955 he intended writing a letter to the curator of the Egyptology Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to request carbon-14 dating tests to check some of the theses presented in Ages in Chaos. Velikovsky had been trying for years to persuade the British Museum and other institutions to test relics from the New Kingdom and late period, which in conventional chronology spans some twelve hundred years. Generally, such items tended to be omitted from testing programs because they were notorious for being "contaminated" and yielding unacceptably low ages. When Einstein died, a copy of Worlds in Collision was found open on his desk.

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