Talk:Immanuel Velikovsky/Archive 1

message: In the U.S. Reader's Digest  many years ago there was an article about how it was quite likely that the Biblical "Ten Plagues of Ancient Egypt" were in fact the result of the explosion of a volcano cited as being where the Greek isles are now, and that they are in fact remnants of ancient "Atlantis", destroyed in this massive eruption/explosion, so that two ancient myths tied in nicely (and were mutually verified) in this scenario.  Is this anything from Velikovsky, or just more theorizing from like-minded speculationists? Rlquall 04:04, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: * Not Velikovsky: Carl Sagan. Later Thera research seems to contradict an effect wide enough. V says his comet did it. When the geophysics of the Thera eruption began to appear it was natural enough to comb the area to see who might have copped the blast, it being a biggie. So superheated discussion arose (still goes on) on the effects on Crete. The whole Ten Plages seems a bit of a stretch, but there I go POV, and we'll have to start quoting the contending authors!!! The good stuff in this connection is the tie in to the Claude Schaeffer (Stratigraphie Comparee) material on catastrophic destructions around the place, which does zoom straight into the V corpus. Both Thera and V give the Schaeffer material something to bite on, viz., here's someone coming up with a mechanism that at least might contribute to explaining some destruction seen in the stratigraphy {or not :)} 
On Thera this article is good.
JC 12:56, 16 January 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Several years ago in ''Reader's Digest'' 

message: Contra John, in the balance of all the material about, the article is slightly to the anti side. Flagging it disputed is not yet necessary IMHO, and the fact that that's under discussion is really the whole point - vide the additional entry under PseudoHistory, which is as POV as you could wish. Debating the individual points in a short encyclopaedia entry is not going to happen. The essence is to look at statements of the form "no respectable scientist now believes" and "the .... material is entirely discredited". Was the author worthy of a listen, and did he get it? Who says so, and who not? Is his hypothesis or theme still the subject of worthwhile endeavour? Are there things to learn from the treatment of the man and his ideas? There is an ENORMOUS volume of tirade and an ocean of genuinely sincere research. Clearly there is also a sea of derision. I will add some notables on either side, but any vilification and POV in either direction needs to be in quotes, cited. Or here in discussion of course :) 
JC 12:40, 16 January 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  POV or Not: how to proceed 

message: that there appeared to be no correlation in the written or archeological records between Jewish history (as recorded in Biblical and other sources) and the history of the adjoining nations (Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Persia etc).
This simply is not true.  There is at least one notable Egyptian synchronism (Sheshonq I/Shishak's invasion in the 5th year of Rehoboam).  There are numerous Assyrian synchronisms, notably a fight by Shalmaneser III against Ahab (and others) in 853 BC; tribute by Jehu to Shalmaneser III in 841 BC; Adad-nirari III mentions Jehoash of Israel in 796 BC; Tiglath-Pileser III mentions Menahem in 740 and 738 BC, Pekah in 733 and 732 BC; and Hoshea in 732 and 731 BC.  Shalmaneser V and Sargon II both discuss the final destruction of the northern Kingdom.  This can all be fit fairly well into the chronology provided by the Book of Kings, provided one admits that Pekah has been given an erroneous reign length.  Beyond this, it is true that there are not too many external synchronisms with the Bible.  But there are numerous Biblical descriptions which fit neatly into the standard chronology.  Although "So of Egypt" is apparently unidentifiable, references to Pharaohs Tirhaka (Taharqa), Necho, and Hophra (Apries/Wahibre) are easily identifiable, and fit in exactly where they are supposed to.  So do the Babylonian kings Merodach-Baladan , Nebuchadnezzar, and Evil-Merodach.  So do the Assyrian kings Pul/Tiglath-Pileser III, Shalmaneser V, Sennacherib, and Esarhaddon.  So does Cyrus.  Given the paucity of records, in general, in the periods under discussion, I don't see how this can come out to "no correlation."  Obviously, some parts of the Old Testament narrative have no correlation - the narratives of the Patriarchs, the Exodus, the wanderings in the desert (although one would not expect much record of them), Joshua's conquest, the United Kingdom period.  But if we mean "the United Kingdom period and before" we should say that - and we clearly don't mean that, since we say there aren't any correlations with Assyria, Babylon, and Persia, when in fact there are many, and exactly where one would expect them to be.  As usual, creeping misleading pro-Velikovsky subtlety appears in this article... john k 07:28, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: You are getting confused: that paragraph is talking about's V's MOTIVATION - and to him, in the 1940s, there certainly WAS a problem, which he was trying to address. Whatever acdemic consensus has been reached on these issues in the last half century is irrelevant to this point.--feline1 09:55, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  you are confused, as the article is basically stating (in that paragraph) what V's primary motivation for his theories was, not whether or not his theories were correct. And that WAS his primary motivation, it IS what he believed. You might wish to edit the text to further clarify that.... if so, be my guest..... (Perhaps you are right that V was more concerned with Jewish history 's archeological problems from Genesis to Solomon...sounds plausible - but please check before just hacking the text to add some unncessary "V was wrong" POV stuff)
I am not interested in getting into whether Velikovsky was wrong.  That is unrelated to this issue.  What the article said is that his motivation was that there did not seem to be any correlations between Biblical history annd near eastern history more broadly.  I suppose it's possible that it did not seem to him that there were any correlations.  But I find this hard to believe, given that there were, even in Velikovsky's time, numerous well known and obvious correlations between Biblical history and the history of the Near East as known to archaeologists.  I don't know what Velikovsky was specifically concerned about, but I do know that we should not give the impression that Velikovsky was correct that there were none. john k 18:03, 16 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well I wrote that paragraph in the article myself, so I can assure you I was only intending to give Velikovsky's motivation, not whether he was "right or wrong"! (The key to a good V article is surely to just tell people know who he was and what he believed, and the reaction this provoked in others - any attempt to critique his ideas is doomed to POV hell and will not make for a  good wikipedia entry...!). If you want to check what V's motivations are, he states them at length in his Ages in Chaos and a further wealth of biographical context is available from both his own autobio stuff and many hundreds of pages that people who knew him have written. I would be cautious about editing that paragraph without thorough knowledge of this material..--feline1 09:16, 17 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Synchronisms 

message: The contents of this article ought to be merged sensibly with the contents of Ages in Chaos, I am open to suggestions how we go about it. PatGallacher 10:01, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Ages in Chaos

message: Please see the Carl Sagan discussion page if you are familiar with Sagan's critique of Velikovsky's work. --JWSchmidt 00:16, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Request for help at [[Carl Sagan]] 

message: I tried to add a Pro-V reference  http://www.varchive.org/dag/ that has some interesting stuff.  I think the big contribution V made was in disputing the 500 years of so-called dark ages.  Here is some text from the reference summary, hope it is appropriate to put it here.  I only do so because disputing the chronology is V's lasting legacy, IMO the wiki should make more mention of it:
"When the decipherment of the Mycenaean Linear B script proved the language to be Greek, the so-called Homeric problem grew more perplexing... How could a people that was already literate forfeit its literacy so completely for over four hundred years? 
"And if such was the case, how is it that so many details of Mycenaean life, habits and armaments were well known to Homer though a Dark Age of several centuries’ duration intervened? 
"The very fact that none of the Greek philosophers, historians, geographers, statesmen or poets ever referred to a Dark Age preceeding the Ionic Age and separating it from the Mycenaean Age, should have been enough to cast doubt on the soundness of the overall construction.
"The conclusion at which we have arrived is this: between the Mycenaean and the Ionian Ages there was no Dark Age, but one followed the other, with only a few decades intervening."
tom 05:40, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: But that's no reason not to describe Velikovsky's view, as long as we do so neutrally, accurately, and verifiably, and, don't present it as fact. --Iantresman 16:41, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Added a reference 

message: Nice to see user "Science Apologist" tagging things for citations for once, rather than just deleting stuff. It may take a day or two to track some of these down, but I'm sure we can manage it...
-On occasions where astronomers did agree to printed debate in popular periodicals (most notably Prof. John Q. Stewart of Princeton University in Harper's Magazine, June 1951, and Prof Lloyd Motz of Columbia University in Yale Scientific Magazine, April 1967), Velikovsky's legal training, skill as a debater and polymath knowledge of the humanities generally left lay audiences with the impression that he'd left the astronomers floundering. -- are the refs for these ones not the Harper's and Yale issues cited in the sentence?? There may be more reaction in other meta-books (V.Affair, Stargazers&Gravediggers, further Larrabee in Harpers?.
-Velikovsky played on the conduct of many academics to make claims of "suppressed genius", in which he likened himself to martyred Renaissance scientist/heretic Giordano Bruno.[citation needed] - i forget where V writes about Bruno - S&G again? Or some of the manuscripts on the V.Archive site? Is his tactics for supporter rallying discussed by Ellenberger?
-The storm of controversy created by Velikovsky's publications may have helped revive the catastrophist movement in the second half of the 20th century; however it is also held by some working in the field that progress has actually been retarded by the negative aspects of the so-called Velikovsky Affair. Works with similar themes, such as those of de Santillana and von Dechend, Allan and Delair, and Clube and Napier (see References below), have met in part with an academic tolerance never experienced by Velikovsky himself, and even with acclaim by critics of the originals.[citation needed] - Anyone got any refs for positive reviews of Clube&Napier, etc? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Feline1 (talk • contribs) 21:26, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Positive Clube & Napier refs include: Colin Keay favorably reviewed Cosmic Winter in a 1991 Australian Physicist. Endeavour also gave it a favorable short review; Martin Beech's review of their Cosmic Winter in a 1991 Astronomy Now.(refed in Ellenberger's "Antidote to Velikovskian Delusions"--feline1 21:47, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Citations needed

message: Since User:Feline1 has seemed to have asserted some level of article ownership, I am tagging this article with cleanup, totally disputed, and expert tags. We need accurate sourcing of some of the more colorful prose if this controversial article is going to fulfill reliability, verifiability, and neutrality. --ScienceApologist 15:23, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Erm, right, if you really feel it's "totally" necessary :/ I don't think I "own" the article, but I was one of the editors who spent a lot of time turning it from an outrageous cut-and-paste hagiography piece from a velikovsky site, it something which tried to present V's sprawling theories concisely and accurately, note the controversy they caused, and explain that they remain almost wholly rejected by mainstream science...I've tried to show how some of the specific bits of the article that your queried fit into the structure of the whole piece, and googled up some Bruno references for you, and asked one's of V's most knowledgable and robust skeptics if he can chip in finding more citations.....I can certainly see why the arbitration committee admonished you to "remember to respect all policies and guidelines, in spirit as well as letter, when editing articles concerning some alternative to conventional science. This applies in particular to matters of good faith and civility"...--feline1 15:44, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Alright, I'll just assume we're getting off on the wrong foot. You don't step on my toes and I won't step on yours, okay? --ScienceApologist 16:00, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Fine! :) For what it's worth, I think it is good to make the article as robust and well referenced as possible, since a steady trickle of people to this day still encounter Velikovsky for the first time, and having a neutral and accurate article on the whole business on wikipedia is valuable. If someone reads one of his old books, their first question will usually be "where does this all stand now?" - well, the issues have been done and dusted to death over the years if you know the right circles to ask in, and I hope this article reflects that reasonably well. I fail to see how anyone could read the article as it stands now and think it somehow "vindicates" Velikovsky. (Neither does it take the mocking tone which characterises Shapley, Sagan or more recently Phil Plait's critiques, but we don't want that on wikipedia, do we?) I note the the article currently has a long bibliography of references, but these are generally not tied to specific parts of the text with the more new-fangled wikipedia numbered-footnotes way of doing things. I think it would be a valuable contribution to the article if it could be tightened in this way, tying specific statements to specific refs. Ian Tresman has made a start on this yesterday with his two numbered footnotes. Perhaps this is the best way forward to improve the article, as I guarentee you that nearly every thing you've put a  tag beside is covered in that huge bibliography list.--feline1 16:14, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: FWIW, I think the article right now is a bit too sympathetic to Velikovsky unapologetically assuming his maverick status, claiming that he made "predictions" that came true, and generally adopting an accomodationist tone that doesn't really belong in an encyclopedia. Velikovsky is notable because his ideas were rejected by the mainstream academy and accepted by a certain group of people who weren't in the mainstream academy. The tone of the article should be descriptive of Velikovsky's marginal status rather than adopting the overly-emotive language such as "astronomers floundering". Plait's tone, in my humble opinion, is closer to neutral than this article's tone except where he goes off in his colloquial diatribes (which can be referenced and described but shouldn't be used as a model for dispassionate writing).--ScienceApologist 16:41, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well... it's "sympathetic" in that it doesn't indulge in ad hominem abuse, but not in the sense that it does categorically state that V's ideas have been disproven and rejected! I don't doubt there's still scope for improving the language but I think tightnening the referencing is more important. Astronomers *did* flounder, anyways, I watched 'em! :) - not least cos some of V's "predictions" did appear to "come true" in the public's eyes - that's why the AAAS had a conference about it to try and set things straight, and Sagan was reduced to making up childish strawmen about frogs raining down from Venus (?!) I am not very interested in Plait - he is a tertiary source, merely rehashing stuff from the 50s and 70s, with nothing new of his own apart from some new mistakes! it's not very helpful - moreover, undue weight should not be given to astronomy when debunking Velikovsky - Forrest's critique of his literary sources, and in particular Sach's demolition of his cunieform and Mewhinny's piece on the Al Arish tablets do vastly more damage that any quibblings about greenhouse effects...for example have you read the  Sachs transcript? it's the very last link on the article page: unlike so many of the astronomical arguments, where you'll still find people arguing the details to this day, it utterly annhilates many of V's key uses of source material, and to my knowledge not one single rebuttal has been put forward in the last 42 years...--feline1 16:58, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

text: Typical of some of the anti-science bias present in this milleu, you seem to be content that Sagan, Plait, etc. "floundered", made mistakes, and still debate Velikovsky's ideas when such is an obvious POV-interpretation. Velikovsky is noted in introductory astronomy classes for being a prime example of pseudoscience, and as Wikipedia is often used as a such a resource, we need to be very clear about his evaluation as such (his lack of training didn't help matter, neither). --ScienceApologist 17:35, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: That's not what I'm "content with" at all, you really seem to have a one-track mind with these things! Must you persist in perceiving people as your opponents and attributing them with bad faith and spam for brains?  To clarify: Plait wasn't one of the astronomers I was referring to re: the "floundering" (that's talking about a particular set of exchanges with Velikovsky in magazines in the 50s & 60s, such as Harpers - all referenced in the article - a Prof. Stewart was one of the victims, as I recall - and it is a documented phenomenon). V's exchanges with Sagan demonstrably problematic and these two have been documented at length by commentators over the years all this is referenced in the article. I did read Plait's "Bad Astronomy" article on Velikovsky, but as I said, I didn't see any new criticisms of V's work in it (hardly surprising as V has been a little quiet with new ideas *to* criticise since his death in 1979!), but I did spot a few innaccuracies regarding what V actually wrote, so as such I'd view Plait as a tertiary source with little if anything to add to the whole affair............. the fact remains that Velikovsky wrote comparatively little on astronomy (around 20% of his output?), and even those ideas were almost entirely deduced from literary sources. Much of the behaviour of astronomers when critiqueing Velikovsky has been documented as problematic, and very little of their criticism was accepted straight off without a great deal of refutation and counter-refutation (again, go read the literature...) Conversely, critiques of V's literary and archeological material, which formed a much greater part of his output, have generally been much more devastating and unequivocable. Sachs probably provides the best example of this. We didn't hear one peep out of V in response.  Ultimately, I don't believe there is much to disagree on: the end conclusion is still that "Velikovsky's theories have demonstrably been proven wrong" - however the article would be deeply flawed if it portrayed this as being all down to the US astronomy community (not least celebricty scientist Carl Sagan)-  it is a notable strand in the "Velikovsky Affair" that the behaviour of the astronomy community was one of the main reasons that Velikovsky became a best-seller and celebrated cause on campuses in the first place...... --feline1 18:01, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

text: Ellenberger notes that "[Plait] is the first to explain why a Venus flyby where atmospheres touch would loose the Moon.  And therefore the Moon's nearly circular orbit proves WiC did not happen"... to be honest, I'm half-sure I remember someone back in the 50s spluttering the same retort, but off the top of my head I couldn't tell you who...--feline1 19:30, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Tagging the article

message: I will need to dig through some paper archives to track down refs for this particular incident. However off the top of my head, they will consist of sthg like: (i) V's claim about radio noises was made at a public lecture in 1953, the text of which was published as an Appendix to Earth in Upheaval (1955). (ii) Bergman & Motz had a letter published in a Physics journal, attempting to claim priority for V. (iii) One of Leroy Ellenberger's polemic pieces has a good summary of why V's "prediction" in this case cannot serve as a good example of V using "scientific method", as his "prediction" is insufficiently detailed to be tested rigorously, and was not well derived by inductive reasoning.--feline1 17:42, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: As per usual with Velikovsky's "confirmed" predictions. --ScienceApologist 00:42, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Jupiter Radio Noises

message: I believe this might be best referrenced with the letter between geologist Harry Hess and Science editor Philip Abelson? Again I will need to dig out the references....--feline1 18:03, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: "Doors of academia closed to him"