From: justinf@cco.caltech.edu (Justin Fang)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Robert Bass on Velikovsky and Physics
Followup-To: talk.origins
Date: 14 Dec 1992 12:48:49 GMT
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: macintosh25.cco.caltech.edu

In article <174@fedfil.UUCP>, news@fedfil.UUCP (news) wrote:
> I am not a dynamical astronomer.  Robert Bass is or was;  I am uncertain
> as to whether he is still alive.  His credentials read as follows:
> 
> Rhodes scholar, doctorate under Aurel Wintner, world's leading
> authority on celestial mechanics, 3 years of post doctoral work in
> non-linear mechanics at Princeton under Solomon Lefschetz.
> Developed a dynamical explanation for Bode's law in the 1950's.

So? Even brilliant scientists can have a few crackpot ideas. Newton, for
instance messed around with alchemy. Just because someone's a genuis
doesn't mean they're automatically right.
 
[much stuff about the instability of the solar system deleted for brevity.]

Actually, there is some evidence that the solar system is chaotic. In a
fairly recent issue of _Discover_ there was an article about two scientists
who built an analog computer to compute planetary orbits to an extreme
degree of accuracy. They found that changing the initial conditions
slightly could result in a considerable change down the road. Proof of
Velikovsky? No. The chaotic behavior appeared on a scale of millions of
years, not the thousands Velikovsky needs. Furthermore I don't think they
got anywherte near the massive amount of cosmic shuffling Velikovsky
proposed.

> 3)  If one started Venus in an orbit lying entirely between the orbits
> of Jupiter and Saturn, with precisely the appropriate initial position
> and velocity, it would within LESS THAN TWO DECADES work its way inward
> into an orbit lying entirely between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
> (This follows from observations of the comet Oterma III and the fact
> that, in the restricted problem of three bodies, the mass of the
> smallest body is irrelevant.  

But how would it get there in the first place? It can't form there, since
that position is too unstable to allow planets to accrete.
 
> 4) There is no plausible explanation for the anomalous (retrograde)
> rotation of Venus, other than that it originally had prograde spin and
> was later flipped upside-down by a near collision with some other
> planet.

The current aaccepted explanation is that, early during the formation of
the solar system, Venus was struck by a large planetoid which reversed its
spin. Still no evidence for Velikovsky, since this occured billions of
years ago, when there were still lots of planetoids floating around.

[Two more paragraphs deleted.]
 
> 7)  The eminent dynamical astronomer E.W. Brown, in his retiring speech as
> president of the American Astronomical Society in 1931, quite
> explicitely stated that there is no quantitative reason known to
> celestial mechanics why Mars, Earth, and Venus could not have nearly
> collided in the past.

True. There are still many reasons why it is extremely improbable that they
did so, however. It's not just Velikovsky's (and Ted's) astrophysics I have
problems with, it's his chemistry, geology, biology, archealogy,...

> All of which is certainly good enough for me.  Bass' article mentioned a
> couple of mathematical backup papers which I've not seen and which might
> still be available from Brigham Young, but I don't need them.  I've
> checked all of the historical references, and they all check out.
> Theory exists in order to explain reality.  History IS reality.  When
> the two conflict, you change the theory.  In this case of course, it
> appears to be only in the minds of the lesser lights that there is any
> conflict.  If a guy like Bass can't see any, I don't see any reason to
> worry about it.

Here Ted and I have our major philisophical difference. When given the
choice between:
A) Ancient mythology, handed down over thousands of years with all the
transmission errors that implies; and
B) Modern science, the life's work of many, many, scientists, forming a
logical,  coherent, consistent structure (admittedly incomplete, but
growing all the time), backed up by massive amounts of empirical evidence
and confirmed experiments;
I choose the latter. Ted chooses the former. His choice.
BTW, since when is history guarenteed to be correct?

> Note that of the seven items Bass mentioned, all can be seen as denying
> that Velikovskian scenarios violate physical laws in any sense.  Two can
> be seen as indicating that Velikovsky's scenarios or something entirely
> like them are positively required by the available evidence;  again:

Just because something is theoretically possible doesn't mean it happened.
For instance if I open a bottle of perfume and let it all evaporate,
nothing says that the perfume molucules can't randomly all wind up back in
the bottle. (remember "Maxwell's Demon"?) It's just very, very unlikely.
Besides, like I said before, it's not just Velikovsky's (and Ted's)
astrophysics I have problems with, it's his chemistry, geology, biology,
archealogy,...
 
[recap of earlier arguments deleted]

> Item four appears to assume the usual multi-billion year history of our system
> as a starting point, although the logical implications of the observation
> essentially demand that that view be abandoned.

Not quite yet, Ted.
 
> -- 
> Ted Holden
> HTE
Newsgroups: talk.origins