Talk:Immanuel Velikovsky

Velikovsky was right on some things

There are a few things that he was correct about but no mention in the article.

For example, he was right about the high surface temperature on Venus; though his explanation/mechanics may have been off.

The same is true for extraterrestrial causes for massive cataclysms that happened to the Earth; though, again his explanations/mechanics may have been off or wrong.

Look at what is now accepted as to what happened to the Earth during its first few billion years of existence. At the time Velikovsky wrote, most of these ideas either did not exist or were summarily scoffed at.

Look at how long it took the scientists & scientific community to accept that rocks fell from the sky. We now know these as "meteorites."

Then there's one of the major causes of the 'extinction' of the dinosaurs. How long did it take the community to accept that something that big could hit the Earth.

Then there's the now accepted way of how the Moon came into existence. For the longest time the scientific community believed that it was captured by Earth's gravity. Now, the same scientific community accepts that it was created from a collision between the Earth and a near Mars-size body.

Yet with all this that is now accepted, no one even gives passing recognition to Velikovsky for helping current scientists to think out of the box and, as new movie versions/remakes are said to be, "reimagine" what could've happened.

Scientist even now accept that most of the planets have moved/wandered about the solar system and eventually settled into their current orbits.

This was one of Velikovsky's explanations/mechanics !

Scoffed at then - - - accepted now.

As such, I think that somewhere in his article some credit should be given to him.

Comments/ideas. 2600:8800:784:8F00:C23F:D5FF:FEC4:D51D (talk) 19:21, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Old hat.

"High temperature of Venus": Very old hat. He did not specify any Kelvin value, he just said "hot" instead of "cold", which gives his guess an expected hit rate of 50%. If we called that a success in the article, we should do the same for articles about those 50% of clairvoyants who happened to correctly predict the winner of an election with two parties.

It's even worse for "extraterrestrial causes". There are two possibilities: terrestrial or extraterrestrial. In this case, both are applicable to "cataclysms", whatever you mean by that - what Velikovsky meant was things that never happened, such as the sun standing still at Gideon - giving him an expected hit rate of 100%, since "terrestrial causes" would have been a "hit" too.

And so on. This attempt to justify the fantasies of a crackpot is feeble bullshit, and it is the same feeble bullshit that is always used by people who fell for V's fantasies due to their own ignorance of how science works. --Hob Gadling (talk) 05:22, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

2600:8800:784:8F00:C23F:D5FF:FEC4:D51D has little to offer about the claimed "few things that he was correct about" and none of them merit inclusion in the article.

Hob Gadling has dealt with a couple of them. The only other is the claim that "most of the planets have moved/wandered about the solar system and eventually settled into their current orbits". No scientist accepts that this happened within historic times, as Velikovsky claimed.

As for the assertion that "no one even gives passing recognition to Velikovsky for helping current scientists to think out of the box", there is absolutely no evidence that Velikovsky has had any influence whatsoever on the conclusions of "current scientists".

-- Jmc (talk) 19:36, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

'novel interpretations'

The lede on this article is about as far from a neutral POV as you'll find anywhere in WP. It actually looks to be an attempt to discourage people from actually scrutinizing the evidence I.V. collected from around the world.

Did Velikovsky surmise wildly when he interpreted the evidence? There were certainly plenty of examples of that when I read his books. But look at the evidence he collected. And we know a -lot- more about the solar system than was known back then.

The 'outrage' over his interpretations has clearly diverted many from scrutinizing the evidence. It certainly collided with the hidebound worlds of orthodoxy. To this day, anyone who actually reads through 1955's Earth In Upheaval (no details about it are available on WP; that's ... interesting) has got be astounded at the depth and scope of the evidence I.V. pulled together.

In the intervening 65 years, much of this evidence has been backed up by earth-orbiting imagers (raising even more questions!), and much of it remains unexplained. Anyone can go visit these places. Like the terraces going above the snow-line in the Andes, they're not made up. The Siberian islands buried in washed-up mammoth tusks are still waiting.

Since his day we've seen (to mention just three): the emergence of plate tectonics (proposed by Wegener a half-century earlier...and adopted 10 years after I.V.'s first book) --- the recognition that the Earth has been struck by thousands of impactors (we even have government programs to watch for asteroids now) --- and that hundreds of megafauna species went suddenly extinct 13ka.

14 years after EiU, in 1969 Hamlet's Mill was published, providing more evidence (and outrage) of the weaknesses in existing theories. At that we didn't even realize that many archeological sites were observatories! THAT article actually examines the book, rather than resorting to name-calling (even adding some positive reviews ... I thoroughly enjoyed it; it's full of learning about remarkable things!)

J Harlen Bretz got pilloried for his 'catastrophism'. In the end (he outlived his critics) he won the top prize in geology. Because he was right about the evidence. (They weren't so quick to apply the hot 'pseudoscience' brand in those days.)

Gathering and publishing evidence (overlooked and unexplained to this day) is not in itself pseudoscience! I think that easy shortcut is out-of-place in any encyclopedia, particularly when it's used before a balanced appraisal, that should leave such conclusions to the reader after she has been appraised of the facts.

But that requires actually knowing the facts first. It's not clear that our authors, so far, have bothered to know them.

The meat of the article is fine, but the witch-burning rhetoric is uncalled for; a reasoning appraisal would be much more useful to the reader. Consequently, I'm adding an NPOV objection to the top of the article. Twang (talk) 02:37, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Your first paragraph is exactly what every pseudoscience fan writes about the Wikipedia article about the pseudoscience in question. The second paragraph says nothing.

After the third paragraph, I did not read any further because I knew it would not get any better:

anyone who actually reads through 1955's Earth In Upheaval (no details about it are available on WP; that's ... interesting) has got be astounded at the depth and scope of the evidence I.V. pulled together. That is bullshit. Maybe it is true for someone who does not understand a single one of the disciplines V tried to revolutionize. But:

If you understand astronomy, you realize that what he wrote about astronomy is unadulterated crap.

If you understand history, you realize that what he wrote about history is unadulterated crap.

If you understand mythology, you realize that what he wrote about mythology is unadulterated crap.

If you understand physics, you realize that what he wrote about physics is unadulterated crap.

I did read his stuff - just one book, that was enough. --Hob Gadling (talk) 18:25, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Why were my additions to the criticism section reverted? Please help.

I am new to editing Wikipedia, and I apologize if I did something wrong by adding the quotes from Albert Einstein's letters to Velikovsky to the criticism section. I don't think they would be more appropriate if added to the Velikovskyism section under the 'Reception' heading. Could someone please advise on how to proceed? I am wondering if I should start a new section called 'Mixed criticism', perhaps, or what to do to appropriately add this information to the Immanuel Velikovsky page so that it is not again deleted. It is important that we set the record straight that Einstein engaged with Velikovsky's ideas, and it would be more than an embarrassment to the academy if a Princeton historian's unbiased record of Velikovsky-Einstein correspondence is inadequate for use on Wikipedia (not to mention that Michael D. Gordin is also inappropriately cited at the end of the first paragraph of the entry, which gives the impression that he is in favor of calling Velikovsky a pseudo-scholar; he is clearly not in favor of this sort of terminology but maintains that 'pseudoscience' lacks content and is a "term of abuse" -- please see the first few pages of the introduction to Gordin's The Pseudoscience Wars). The scientific establishment is further undermined by the fact that our most respected scientist's views are suspiciously omitted from this entry, which is why I took the time and effort to carefully edit. Thank you in advance should anyone have a suggestion for how to include this relevant and important information regarding Velikovsky's reception.

@Fringe-Friendly You may like to look at this article, which throws doubt on Gordin's claim that Worlds in Collision was found on Einstein’s desk at his death. It includes a Life magazine photograph of Einstein's desk at his death and asserts that "Velikovsky’s own daughter, Ruth Sharon, wrote in her 1995 biography of her father that Einstein’s secretary, Helen Dukas, objected to the claim that Worlds in Collision sat on Einstein’s desk in his final hours."

To quote: "Despite these facts, both claims—that Worlds in Collision sat on Einstein’s desk and that Einstein praised the book at his final meeting with Velikovsky—appear at face value in Michael D. Gordin’s much-praised book about the Velikovsky controversy, The Pseudoscience Wars (2012), which makes me question what else the author took at face value." -- Jmc (talk) 08:59, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks so much for the quick reply and for sharing this blog post, @Jmc -- very interesting, indeed! I hadn't heard that about Blavatsky's book being left open on Einstein's desk! Wow! Thanks to Colavito for making note of this suspicious parallel. I will look into it in my own research. It is a little disappointing that we can't now ask Velikovsky's daughters where they got this idea. I agree with you that it's appropriate to let that last sentence of my additions go -- at least till we have more certain information.

I will say, however, that the larger part of my additions did not come from Velikovsky's own reports as to what Einstein said. The quotes below from Einstein that I added were taken directly from Einstein's signed letters, unlike the quote that Colavito tries to debunk. I don't currently see any reasons from Colavito or others to seriously doubt the authenticity of these quotes taken directly from Einstein's signed letters:

Regarding Earth in Upheaval, Einstein said, "[Velikovsky] is a professional revolutionary. I consider him gifted, but uncritical... He is himself a bit crazy, but is however right when he says that everything goes evenly in nature. He writes interestingly and his books are worth reading."[5] In a letter to Velikovsky regarding the latter's Earth in Upheaval manuscript, Einstein clarified his view:

"The proof of 'sudden' changes (p. 223 to the end) is quite convincing and meritorious. If you had done nothing else but to gather and present in a clear way this mass of evidence, you would have already a considerable merit. Unfortunately, this valuable accomplishment is impaired by the addition of a physical-astronomical theory to which every expert will react with a smile or with anger-- according to his temperament; he notices that you know these things only from hearsay--and do not understand them in the real sense, also things that are elementary to him.... To the point, I can say in short: catastrophes yes, Venus, no."[5]

I do plan to check out the IVP archive myself at some point to verify for myself what Gordin reports, so I am fine with putting this on hold before we add the above quotes back in, which do deserve a place here. Although it seems unlikely from how disparaging many of the remarks from Einstein's letters are (e.g. in the quotes above), there does even remain the possibility that the Einstein letters were somehow forged -- a possibility that Colavito's take on the matter might lend credence to. Though given that Gordin is a historian from a top university and one of our experts regarding Einstein, I would trust that he investigated this himself. Do you think it's a little inappropriate for us to be questioning the work of such a scholar on Wikipedia? It would sure help if Colavito's work had undergone peer-review -- I wonder if he has tried and failed or something? We might push him to try to publish on this if he hasn't already tried.

In the meantime, I think it's important to note, with due respect to the academic scholarship of Gordin, that he says in his introduction to The Pseudoscience Wars that he will present the facts as they have been collected in the Velikovsky archive. Since Velikovsky seems to have put the collection together himself, as Gordin notes, it's quite plausible that he did so to cast himself in a more positive light to future historians. Though, as Gordin also notes, the vast majority of the letters Velikovsky saved portray him as a totally inept crank, including some letters from Einstein himself, which makes it a little less convincing that the collection was put together with bias in favor of Velikovsky. Also, it's certainly interesting that Velikovsky never published Before the Day Breaks; that should make what he says therein more trustworthy rather than less, don't you think?

In any case, it is still pretty embarrassing that there is no information regarding the fact that Einstein did engage directly with Velikovsky's ideas. That much, at least, is without question. The blatant omission will appear suspicious to the fringe. I hope you agree that it's important that we correct this as soon as possible.

I certainly plan to get to the bottom of all of this in my own research and publications. Unfortunately, we probably shouldn't take Colavito's blog post with too much seriousness, since according to Wikipedia's guidelines, we should really only be including information from research that has undergone the process of peer-review and publication. While I think insisting on peer-review has its problems, it's important that we respect this rule while we are are here. But Colavito does present ideas that I think are worth looking into in a scholarly fashion.

Thanks again for your interest and support, @Jmc ! I look forward to continuing this conversation regarding Einstein's reception of Velikovsky's ideas. Best wishes. Fringe-Friendly (talk) 18:40, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

The proposed addition is very thin stuff. Einstein's curt dismissal of "a physical-astronomical theory to which every expert will react with a smile or with anger" isn't worthy of inclusion. If Einstein had taken Velikovsky's theories seriously and had engaged with them, that could merit inclusion, but I see no evidence that he did. Jmc (talk) 20:01, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Van Sluijs

Let's talk about [1] instead of edit-warring.

@User:David Highfield: Please read WP:BRD. Do not revert a revert.

The content is true, Velikovsky's ideas are indeed not very original. The format of the external link is wrong, and the site linked is not a reliable source. --Hob Gadling (talk) 10:15, 7 November 2022 (UTC)