Podcast # 9: Velikovsky: The Man
Scott: My name is Scott Paton. I am talking today with Allan Colston. He is the author of the book “The Last Days of Tolemac”. This is a book dealing with prophecy.
For those listeners who may be new to this topic, today’s podcast is the ninth in the series, and is titled “Velikovsky: The Man”. Hello Allan and welcome.
Hello Scott. It’s good to chat to you again.
Scott: I see from the title that you plan to talk about Velikovsky. For people like me who don’t know much about him, who was he and why is he important to prophecy?
Well Scott, in order to do justice to the man and his work, I need to devote several Podcasts to him. So I intend to divide this into three parts. I have titled this Podcast “Velikovsky: The Man”. The next will be called “The Works of Velikovsky”, and the final Podcast in this series will be “Velikovsky: His Impact on Prophecy”
Scott: It sounds like Velikovsky was an important man.
He certainly was Scott, but to understand why, I’d like to start off with an anecdote.
The late Middle Ages were a dangerous time to be alive in Western Europe. The Catholic Church of Rome was the established guardian of thought, and anyone who challenged their ideas was branded as a heretic, and liable to be burned at the stake.
It was into this world of closed thought that an Italian astronomer by the name of Galileo published a treatise, announcing that the earth was not the centre of the universe, but actually travelled around the sun. In support of this revolutionary thesis, Galileo presented evidence provided by his telescope, an instrument that he had himself invented in 1609, at the age of 45.
He invited the Cardinals of the Church to look through his telescope, and see the truth for themselves. The Cardinals were outraged. “We won’t look through your telescope“, they cried, “because we already know the truth. We already know how the universe is ordered, and if your telescope were to show us anything different, it would be an instrument of the Devil.”
Galileo was accused of heresy, and ordered to stand trial before the Court of the Inquisition. But he was lucky, because he was spared from being burned at the stake. However, he was ordered to make a public confession, and was sentenced to a life in isolation, by spending the remainder of his days under house arrest at his villa at Arcetri in Italy, where visitors were forbidden.
For the courage of his convictions, and his defiance of authority at the risk of his own life, Galileo is considered today to be one of the founding fathers of science, and a supreme example of the quest for scientific truth in the face of official dogma.
Scott: So what does this have to do with Velikovsky?
The reason why I mention this anecdote Scott, is because the way the Cardinals of the Church of Rome responded to Galileo, is exactly the way the scientists of the 20th century reacted to Velikovsky.
Like Galileo, Velikovsky came up with a revolutionary theory that turned the neatly ordered world of astronomy on its head, by introducing new concepts that radically challenged the accepted scientific view of the universe of that time.
But instead of examining the detailed evidence provided by Velikovsky, according to the protocols of science initiated by men like Galileo, the Hierarchy of Scientific thought at that time responded in hysterical fashion.
Professor Harlow Shapley, then Director of Harvard College observatory, exploded by saying: “If Dr Velikovsky is right, then the rest of us are crazy”.
And Dean McLaughlin, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Michigan denounced Velikovsky for – and I quote – “the promulgation of such lies, yes lies, as are contained in wholesale lots in his book “Worlds in Collision.”
Yet the amazing fact was that neither man had actually bothered to read Velikovsky’s book. In fact, both of them boasted that they would never do so. But their opposition to Velikovsky’s ideas didn’t stop at insult and character assassination.
They joined other critics in forming an academic pressure group that succeeded in getting the original publisher to drop his book. They did this by threatening to block its lucrative textbook business.
Velikovsky was branded as a heretic, and his ideas were denounced in official scientific journals. For most of the 1950s and early 1960s, Velikovsky was forbidden to appear on college and university campuses.
Leading scientific journals of the time were filled with inflammatory articles of derision and denial, yet when Velikovsky tried to answer his critics and rebut their accusations, these same scientific journals denied him the chance to respond.
It was a case of Galileo versus the Catholic Church all over again.
Scott: You make it sound like a modern witch hunt.
It was a witch hunt Scott. A witch hunt on a scale unlike anything that had happened previously among the scientific community. The Velikovsky affair remains to this day one of the greatest scandals in the history of science, and by far the greatest stain on the face of the so-called objective quest for scientific truth.
But what galvanised this witch hunt at the time, and which still continues to this day, was the fact that Velikovsky had the audacity to make pronouncements about other areas of science than those in which he was originally trained.
According to Carl Sagan, a leading astronomer of the time, this was the hallmark of the quack, the charlatan who believes he knows more than his peers, as well as thousands of others who have devoted their entire lives to one single subject.
Or as Dean McLaughlin wrote at the time: “No man today can hope to correct the mistakes in any more than a small sub-field of science. And yet Velikovsky claims to be able to dispute the basic principle of several sciences. These are indeed delusions of grandeur“.
Yet despite this haughty denunciation of his work, it is likely that Velikovsky will one day be recognized as one of the greatest multi-disciplinary minds since Leonardo da Vinci. His work challenged the accepted ideas of the time in a wide range of scientific disciplines, from history and geography, to geology and astronomy, and even cosmology.
In fact Velikovsky can be regarded as one of the pioneers in the field of Astrophysics, by being the first to point out the existence of the magnetosphere around the earth, and the electromagnetic properties of comets.
And if that wasn’t enough, he even managed to turn the world of Biology upside down by proposing a new theory of Evolution to replace that of Charles Darwin. The profound impact that his work has had on the world of science can be summarised in another amusing anecdote.
Shortly before his death in 1955, Albert Einstein, who had been a long time friend of Velikovsky, said to him, “Of all the many disciplines that have been affected by your work, I am glad that you have left the science of mathematics intact“.
Scott: So what do we know about Velikovsky’s life?
Velikovsky was born into a prosperous Jewish family in 1895, in the town of Vitebsk, which is now a part of the country of Belarus.
By any standards Velikovsky proved to be an unusual man. He learned several European languages while he was still a child. He was educated in Moscow, where he distinguished himself in the subjects of Russian and Mathematics, and graduated with a gold medal.
He then travelled to various countries in Europe, and also visited Palestine. This was of course long before Israel became a nation. When he returned to Russia before the outbreak of the first World War, he enrolled at the University of Moscow where he received a Medical degree at the age of 26.
He then left Russia for Berlin where, with the financial help of his father, he edited and published two volumes of scientific papers in Hebrew. It was while he was in Berlin that he enlisted the aid of Albert Einstein in preparing a volume dealing with Mathematics and Physics.
Shortly after his marriage in 1923, he and his wife moved back to Palestine, where he began a successful practice in psychoanalysis, which he had studied while he was in Vienna. He was also instrumental with Einstein in setting up the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
With the prospect of another World War looming, Velikovsky travelled with his family to New York, where they remained until the end of the war. It was during this period in New York that Velikovsky began his research into the ideas that were to dominate the rest of his life.
After the war, when several of his books had already been published, he moved from Manhattan to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived for many years. Then, towards the end of his life he moved again to the West coast, where, suffering from Diabetes, he died in Portland, Oregon, at the age of 84.
Scott: So what caused him to be rejected by the world of science?
The reason why Velikovsky was treated so badly by the scientific community, was that he had the audacity to challenge the very basis of the entire scientific paradigm of that time. His work challenged one of the basic principles of Geology, and of Darwinian evolution. And that was the principle of Uniformitarianism.
According to scientists like James Hutton and Charles Lyell, uniformitarianism was the belief that the natural laws and processes that operated in the past, were the same as those operating today, and that these processes took place gradually over many thousands of years.
Well, the publication of Velikovsky’s first book, which he called “Worlds in Collision”, arrived with the force of an atomic bomb, for it shattered the very idea of uniformitarianism into tiny pieces.
But what made this book even worse from an academic standpoint, was that Velikovsky chose to ignore the traditional form of scientific writing, which used sober academic prose that was devoid of emotional language. Instead, he wrote in a dramatic style that rivalled the best fiction writers of his time.
Scott: Can you give us an example?
You can see what I mean from the following passage taken from his book “Worlds in Collision”.
“Global cataclysms fundamentally altered the face of our planet more than once in historical times. The terrestrial axis shifted. Earth fled from its established orbit. The magnetic poles reversed.
“In great convulsions, the seas emptied onto continents, the planet’s crust folded, and volcanoes erupted into mountain chains. Lava flows up to a mile thick spilled out over vast areas of the earth’s surface.
“Climates changed suddenly, ice settling over lush vegetation, while green meadows and forests were transformed into deserts.
“In a few awful moments, civilizations collapsed. Species were exterminated in continental sweeps of mud, rock and sea. Tidal waves crushed even the largest beasts, tossing their bones into tangled heaps in the valleys and rock fissures, preserved beneath mountains of sediment.
“Surviving generations recorded these events by every means available: in myths and legends, temples and monuments to the planetary gods, precise charts of the heavens, sacrificial rites, astrological canons, detailed records of planetary movements, and tragic lamentations amid fallen cities and destroyed institutions.”
Scott: I see what you mean. Powerful words indeed.
Anyway Scott, I was lucky enough to attend a lecture which Velikovsky gave some years before he died. The title of the lecture was “Mankind in Amnesia”, which also happened to be the title of his final book.
In this lecture Velikovsky explained that, just as an individual is able to block out the memory of a prior traumatic event, so too humanity itself was capable of generating a similar response, by choosing to block out memories of cataclysmic events that had happened on the earth in the past.
He argued that this was the real reason why his theories had been rejected by the scientific community, and why they had generated such an emotional response on the part of people who should have known and behaved better.
It was because the events that he wrote about were still fresh in the subconscious mind of humanity, and that his books stirred up traumatic memories that mankind was still trying to forget.
It is a measure of his stature as a man that, despite the fact that he had been treated as an outcast by his peers, Velikovsky was able to examine this experience through the lens of psychoanalysis.
It would be the task of later generations to re-evaluate his work in the light of this understanding, and finally accord him the honour he was due. As I said earlier, you can find out more about all this on my Blog.
And just a reminder for those people who would like to read my book, it can be reached here
Scott: Thanks Allan. You have been listening to Allan Colston, author of the book “The Last Days of Tolemac”. Do join us for our next Podcast, which will be titled “The Works of Velikovsky”.
