num_pages: 291
description: Properly analyzed the collective mythological and religious writings of humanity reveal that around 1500 BC a comet swept perilously close to Earth triggering widespread natural disasters and threatening the destruction of all life before settling into solar orbit as Venus our nearest planetary neighbor. Sound implausible? Well from 1950 until the late 1970s a huge number of people begged to differ as they devoured Immanuel Velikovskys major best-seller Worlds in Collision insisting that perhaps this polymathic thinker held the key to a new science and a new history. Scientists on the other hand assaulted Velikovskys book his followers and his press mercilessly from the get-go. In The Pseudoscience Wars  Michael D. Gordin resurrects the largely forgotten figure of Velikovsky and uses his strange career and surprisingly influential writings to explore the changing definitions of the line that separates legitimate scientific inquiry from what is deemed bunk and to show how vital this question remains to us today. Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished material from Velikovskys personal archives Gordin presents a behind-the-scenes history of the writers career from his initial burst of success through his growing influence on the counterculture heated public battles with such luminaries as Carl Sagan and eventual eclipse. Along the way he offers fascinating glimpses into the histories and effects of other fringe doctrines including creationism Lysenkoism parapsychology and moreall of which have surprising connections to Velikovskys theories. Science today is hardly universally secure and scientists seem themselves beset by critics denialists and those they label pseudoscientistsas seen all too clearly in battles over evolution and climate change. The Pseudoscience Wars simultaneously reveals the surprising Cold War roots of our contemporary dilemma and points readers to a different approach to drawing the line between knowledge and nonsense.
language: English
title: The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe
publisher: University of Chicago Press