Immanuel Velikovsky was born June 10, 1895 on the outskirts of Vitebsk in Minsk.

The Velikovskys were middle-class urban Russian Jews, which is probably why young Immanuel was able to attend the prestigious and progressive Medvednikov Gymnasium in Moscow. He was an excellent student who graduated with full honors. Afterwards he visited Palestine and received some additional education in Montpelier, France.

Imperial Russia had a strict quota on the number of Jews allowed into higher education, and Velikovsky was not one of the lucky few who made the cut. To further his education he had to study abroad, at a medical school in Edinburgh. Unfortunately it was 1914 and when the Great War broke out he was forced to abandon his studies and return home.

Velikovsky was nothing if not resourceful. He immediately enrolled in the Free University of Moscow, where he studied law and ancient history. The following year he transferred to the University of Moscow and resumed his medical studies. He graduated in 1921 in the thick of the Russian Civil War.

It was not a great time to be a Jew in Russia. (It’s never a great time to be a Jew in Russia but that’s another episode.) The Velikovskys were better off than most, but they were still forcibly relocated to Ukraine. They did not like it there, and got the hell out as soon as they could. They moved to Berlin, quickly integrated into its large Jewish community, and became involved with Zionist causes.

One of those causes was the Scripta Universitatis, a series of of scholarly works intended to serve as the textbooks for a proposed Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Velikovsky’s father provided the funding, and Velikovsky himself was one of the editors. Only two volumes were ever published, but one was a volume of Mathematics and Physics edited by Albert Einstein. The two editors had an amicable relationship and maintained a friendly correspondence throughout their lives.

Only a year later in 1922 Velikovsky’s parents moved to Tel Aviv to further the Zionist cause there. Velikovsky followed them two years later, along with his new wife, violinist Elisheva Kramer. He would live there for the next fifteen years, working as a general practitioner and managing his family’s real estate investments.

He didn’t spend all of his time in Palestine. In the 1930s he became very interested in Freudian psychoanalysis and returned to Europe to study it. He received training from the Monakow Brain Academy Institute in Zurich and directly from Dr. Wilhelm Stekel in Berlin. Eventually he began phasing out his medical practice in favor of psychoanalysis.

Around the same time he also became interested in paranormal phenomena, mostly extra-sensory perception, telepathy, and other psionic powers. A paper he wrote hypothesizing that hallucinations might be the result of sensitive minds receiving intrusive telepathic projections from others even drew praise from Freud himself.

The Revised Chronology

That isn’t to say that the two men got along.

In 1939 Velikovsky read Freud’s last work, Moses and Monotheism, a revisionist history of Judaism that claims that the entire religion was a watered-down form of the monotheistic sun worship introduced by Akhenaten, the iconoclastic and controversial Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh who you probably know better as King Tut’s dad, or maybe as that weird Egyptian guy who gave Thanos a run for his money once.

As you might expect, Moses and Monotheism did not go over well with Zionists. It really did not go over well with Velikovsky, who rightly saw it as an attempt to diminish the influence of Judaism on Western history with the ultimate goal of erasing it from the historical record entirely. He began working on a critique of Freud’s book, “Dreams Freud Dreamed,” with the goal of destroying the master’s arguments by turning his own psychoanalytic techniques against him. As part of his writing process, Velikovsky began conducting extensive historical research so that no one could accuse him of being sloppy. That included a working vacation to New York City… which then became a permanent vacation when the outbreak of World War II prevented him from returning home.

He wasn’t exactly stranded. He had savings, he had a small trickle of passive income from the family real estate holdings in Tel Aviv, and he saw the occasional psychiatric patient from time to time (though he didn’t actually have a license to practice in the United States).

To keep himself occupied he took a desk job at Columbia University to bring in some beer money and, more importantly, it got him access to the university library.

As he was researching the history of Egypt and Israel, Velikovsky ran into a huge problem. Namely, that he could not find any sort of consensus about when the Exodus had taken place. Mostly because there was no mention of the Exodus anywhere other than the Torah.

These days modern scholars believe that the historical parts of the Bible have been edited and embellished to the point where they cannot be relied upon as an accurate depiction of events. Back in the 1940s, though, they were assumed to be reasonably accurate. Most scholars placed the Exodus during the New Kingdom era, sometime after 1500 BCE, but before 1200 BCE when the Israel is first mentioned by other sources. Traditionally the Pharaoh of Exodus was associated with either Ramesses the Great or Ramesses III, but that association was purely vibes-based (and also because most people didn’t know any other pharaohs).

Velikovsky needed to nail down an older date for the Exodus in order to show that the Jewish religion predated Akehenaten but the lack of corroborating contemporary sources made that seemingly impossible.

Then, one day in the library, he he discovered a translation of The Admonitions of Ipuwer, an ancient papyrus held at the University of Leyden. It’s a sort of general lamentation about a period of relative chaos in Egypt, and contained some imagery that sure sounded a lot like Ten Plagues to Velikovsky…

Indeed, [hearts] are violent, pestilence is throughout the land, blood is everywhere, death is not lacking, and the mummy-cloth speaks even before one comes near it.

Indeed, many dead are buried in the river; the stream is a sepulcher and the place of embalmment has become a stream…

Indeed, the river is blood, yet men drink of it. Men shrink from human beings and thirst after water.

Indeed, gates, columns and walls are burnt up, while the hall of the palace stands firm and endures.

Indeed, the ship of [the southerners] has broken up; towns are destroyed and Upper Egypt has become an empty waste.

Now, the imagery doesn’t exactly line up with the Biblical Plagues, and the writing seems to suggest that the descriptions should be taken figuratively and not literally, but it was good enough for Velikovsky. He had his corroborating source.

There was just one problem: the Admonitions were written during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, some 550 years before the time period Velikovsky was looking at, and therefore far too early to be referring to the Exodus.

Most scholars would have shrugged their shoulders and started looking for something else. Immanuel Velikovsky was not most scholars. He decided the Admonitions were exactly what he needed to make his point, and therefore they had to be contemporary with the Exodus. Which meant that if everyone else thought they had been written in the Middle Kingdom, everyone else was wrong.

Eventually he became convinced that our chronology of Egyptian history was way off, that historians working from poor translations had created some 500 years of phantom history which subsequent scholars had then filled with their own idiosyncratic flights of fancy.

Specifically, he believed that the Nineteenth Dynasty (around 1200 BCE) and the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty (around 700 BCE) were the same dynasties, and that the intervening dynasties had never happened. This worked out very conveniently for him — if the late Nineteenth Dynasty was roughly contemporary with the Babylonians that meant that the Eighteenth Dynasty and that troublesome Akhenaten were about four hundred years too late to have inspired Moses.

Even better, removing these duplicate dynasties seemed to solve a lot of other the mysteries of the ancient world. The Hittites were not some mysterious civilization who vanished from historical records but just boring old Babylonians. The Hyksos who bedeviled the Fifteenth Dynasty become the Amekalites from the book of Samuel. The Queen of Sheba becomes Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The pharaoh who destroys the First Temple becomes Thutmose III. The Sea Peoples are just garden-variety Greeks.

It all made such beautiful perfect sense.

The Problems with the Revised Chronology

Okay, so let’s take a moment to explain why this does not in fact make snese.

The idea that something might be off in our chronologies of the ancient world is actually not all that crazy. Velikovsky was absolutely right that the work of Nineteenth Century scholars is slapdash by modern standards, relying on poor translations of fragmentary sources and scant physical evidence, and further colored by their own idiosyncratic beliefs about things like Atlantis and Theosophy.

However we shouldn’t unthinkingly throw those idiosyncratic ideas out just to replace them with Velikovsky’s own idiosyncratic ideas.

What is crazy about Velikovsky’s hypothesis is not the idea that the chronology is off. What is crazy is the idea that it’s off by half a millennium. If that were really true our understanding of the ancient world would have been truly and totally wrong, to the point where someone surely would have surely noticed at some point in the century before Velikovsky, academic consensus be damned.

We are always in some sense rewriting our knowledge of ancient history as new documents come to light, new scientific techniques allow us to rediscover things once thought irretrievably lost, and our understanding slowly evolves. Carbon dating might tell us that a tomb we thought was from the Fifth Dynasty is actually from the Eighth Dynasty. Archaeological discoveries might topple the conventional wisdom. Newly discovered documents may expand our vocabulary in a way that shed light on previously known documents. Imaging techniques may allow us to read partially destroyed documents or view erased writing on a palimpsest.

Velikovsky’s extraordinary claims were not evidence-based. They drew only on his own intuition. This is a fine approach for a psychoanalyst (if you believe psychoanalysis works, which is a story for another day). For a historian intuition alone cannot suffice. You need something else to back up your hypothesis and Velikovsky had bupkis.

It does not help that his methodology was poor to begin with.

The correspondences he used to construct his chronology are, if anything, even weaker than the correspondences he is criticizing. He conflated events that sound similar but are clearly not identical. He was more interested in correlation than causation. Whenever he ran into a problem he just pruned a few more years until things fit to his satisfaction. And if that wasn’t to someone else’s satisfaction, well, that was their problem.

(It’s probably also worth noting that at no point did Velikovsky ever consider the idea that the Bible may not be entirely accurate — no, it’s the kids who are wrong. Even though entertaining that assumption would have solved most of the problems he was encountering, if not in the way that Velikovsky preferred.)

Cosmic Catastrophism

Back to the main thread.

Now that Velikvosky was convinced that our chronology of the ancient world was askew, he realized he would need to set it straight to make his anti-Freud arguments. He set “Dreams Freud Dreamed” aside and began working on a new book about his Revised Chronology.

Of course, to construct the Revised Chronology without relying on existing chronologies, he needed to find new ways to correlate events. He eventually hit on the idea of correlating astronomical events, which is a great technique. Things like eclipses and big meteors and comets can be seen across huge chunks of the planet and the ancients often kept meticulous records of them.

The problem was he became obsessed with one big astronomical event, namely, the one referenced in Joshua 10:12-14:

On the day the Lord gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the Lord in the presence of Israel:

“Sun, stand still over Gibeon,
and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.”
So the sun stood still,
and the moon stopped,
till the nation avenged itself on its enemies,
as it is written in the Book of Jashar.

The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the Lord listened to a human being. Surely the Lord was fighting for Israel!

That would be a hell of a thing, wouldn’t it? Hard for anyone to ignore. Velikovsky began scouring libraries looking for historical references anywhere in the world tha t mentioned unusually long days or nights in the time period he was looking at.

True to form, he got sidetracked from proving that the Sun had actually stood still and started trying to figure out why the Sun had stood still. During this process he stumbled across a few things that got his mind racing.

• A reference in a texbook to the idea that the Dead Sea had only been formed recently. The book meant that in a geological sense, i.e, a couple of million years, but Velikovsky understood it in a historical sense, i.e., a couple of thousand years.
• The works of a few Russian cranks, using the now-discredited theories of Pierre-Simon Laplace, which argued that comets were burped out by supervolcanoes on the moons of Jupiter.
• William Whiston’s New Theory of the Earth (1696), which argued that a near-miss by a comet had changed the duration of the year and caused the Deluge.
• And finally Ignatius P. Donnelly’s Ragnarok (1883), where he argued that a comet had caused the sun to stadn still over Gibeon.

Eventually, Velikovsky came up with what he felt was a simple and elegant solution to his problem: it was all Venus’s fault.

You see, in the distant past the planet Jupiter spat out a blob of gaseous matter which became a comet. This comet spent a couple of hundred years knocking around the solar system before eventually getting close to Earth and causing a number of physical phenomena that were later interpreted by the Israelites as acts of God.

Due to the vector of approach Earth spent a lot of time in the tail of this comet and the particulates that made it into our atmosphere had a number of different effects.

First there was an almost unnoticeable shower of fine red iron dust that made water around the world look like blood, made it unpalatable to drink, and caused massive die-offs of marine life. That was followed by rains of naphtha or liquid petroleum, which sometimes fell as ashes and sometimes as flaming meteors the size of hailstones. There was even a rain of frogs and locusts and other vermin of extraterrestrial origin. (That’s plagues 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, and 8 if you’re counting.)

As the comet drew closer, its tail completely enveloped the Earth. The thick cloud of gas obscured the sun and slowed the planet’s rotation, creating seven days of near-total darkness and massive catastrophes including earthquakes, volcanoes, extreme weather, and floods. These catastrophes killed off the chosen of Egypt. (Plagues 9 and 10.)

The comet was now so close that it loomed large in the sky and electrical storms between its head and tail could be clearly seen. Some of these discharges even struck the Earth creating a “pillar of fire” which the Israelites used as a navigational beacon. Meanwhile the unusual weather continued, in the form of unpredictable extreme tides which emptied the waters of the Sea of Reeds so the Israelites could cross and then sent them rushing back to drown Pharaoh’s armies.

At this point the Earth and the comet somehow became entangled, and would remain so for the next forty years. The comet’s tail completely enshrouded the earth, causing not only forty years of darkness, but also a rain of extraterrestrial carbohydrates which fed the Israelites during their wanderings. The extreme geological and weather activity continued, creating the spectacular lights and heavenly noises observed at Mt. Sinai.

Eventually Earth and the comet managed to separate themselves… mostly. It wasn’t long before the comet came rushing back towards the planet, and while time the effects of its passing were less extreme it still caused seismic events which weakened the walls of Jericho, rained meteors that struck down the Canaanites, and managed to shift the Earth’s axis and briefly stop its rotation, making the Sun stand still at Gibeon.

After that Earth and the comet really did separate for good. The comet went on its merry way, eventually settling into a stable orbit of its own around 1500 CE, becoming the planet Venus.

Mind you, during its wanderings Venus somehow managed to knock the planet Mars out of its orbit and sent it careening towards Earth as well. In 687 BCE it nearly missed smacking into the planet, but in the process a massive electrical discharge arced between the planets and destroyed the army of Sennacherib as it besieged the gates of Jerusalem. Mars then settled into its current orbit, again sometime during the Renaissance.

All of these cosmic near-collisions and mucking about with the Earth’s rotation had one significant lasting effect: our year was lengthened from 360 days to 365 days.

The half-millennium of near-constant cosmic catastrophes also had a damaging effect to the collective psyche of the ancient world, causing a form of cultural amnesia where people were desperate to forget how destructive these events had been and instead dismissing them as mythological or allegorical and confusing the chroniclers of the day.

Velikovsky was very pleased with himself. He had managed to tie everything up into a nice bow. The cosmic catastrophes caused by Venus explained away many of the supernatural occurrences in the Bible and created events he could use to correlate the histories of different cultures. The cultural amnesia explained the phantom time.

And, most importantly, the Exodus wound up right where he needed it to be in his Revised Chronology.

The Problems with Cosmic Catastrophism

Do I even have to explain why this is all insane? Probably.

Velikovsky was smart, but did not have a good grasp of the physical sciences. He knew just enough to get himself in trouble, and not enough to know when he was in over his head. In his writing this is most evident when he used scientific terminology in extremely unscientific ways.

Still, we must remember that Velikovsky was a product of his time, i,e, the early 1940s, a decade before humanity would manage to start putting objects in orbit and sending probes to other planets. Relativity was still a new concept. Computers were barely a thing. Plate tectonics was not a universally accepted theory. Subsequent advances in astrophysics, cosmology, and planetology are going to absolutely annihilate his hypothesis, but they’re still decades away.

Now, while these ideas certainly seem crazy here after the paradigm shift, I assure you they were still crazy before. As noted in Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy, “What Velikovsky describes is not so much impossible as it is fantastically impossible.”

To prove Venus was of recent origin, Velikovsky quoted Sumerian tablets and Vedic writings which did not mention the planet. Except those texts definitely do mention Venus, as a planet, even in the translations Velikovsky had access to.

While we have hypotheses about how comets are formed, and they are still merely hypotheses, we do know they aren’t pooped out by other planets no matter what Laplace thought. Furthermore, chemical analyses of Jupiter and Venus suggest that they do not have a common origin.

Even if it were possible for Jupiter to spit out comets, to eject a mass the size of the planet Venus would require an enormous amount of energy — so much energy that the ejected mass and large portions of Jupiter itself would be instantly vaporized.

Spitting out a planet would slow Jupiter’s rotation considerably, so if had previously pooped out every other planet as Velikovsky suggested at one point, its original rate of rotation would have been so fast the planet would have literally spun itself apart.

Additionally, the ejection of a giant mass from Jupiter should have really screwed with the orbits of its moons. And yet those moons have nearly perfect circular orbits, which suggest that they have been undisturbed for millions if not billions of years. Likewise, if Venus had, within the last several thousand years, screwed with the orbit of the Earth, the Moon, and Mars their orbits should be far more eccentric than what we currently see.

(In case you were wondering, Velikovsky’s answer to this criticism was that some mechanism other than gravity was responsible for the orbit of planets, probably something electromagnetic. He did not elaborate further, partly because he did not have the scientific or mathematical knowledge required to concoct a coherent hypothesis, and mostly because he really didn’t care about the science — it was just a convenient means to reach the end of his Revised Chronology.)

Also unanswered: how did anyone in the ancient world see these events in enough detail to know that Venus had sprung from Jupiter? To the unaided eye Jupiter and Venus are both just dots in the evening sky, so Venus emerging from Jupiter’s orbit would have been basically invisible.

If Venus had been a comet, it would be a hundred times the size of any other comet known to science. Larger than that, even, since so much material had been blown off of it by the solar winds that Earth was plunged into darkness for forty years and could not escape the particulates in its tail for a century or more.

While it is a comet Venus’s tail consists of whatever Velikovsky needed it consist of at any given moment. When it was creating rivers of blood, it was some sort of iron oxide. When it was creating plagues, it was full of frogs and insects. Rain of fire, flaming hydrocarbons. Manna. Carbohydrates. (He also did not seem to know the difference between hydrocarbons and carbohydrates, so he probably wasn’t the best dinner host.) Needless to say, this is all very convenient. Carl Sagan once quipped:

The only thing that does not seem to drop from the comet is cholesterol to harden Pharaoh’s heart.

If Venus’s tail was a veritable smorgasbord of delights, that raises even more questions. Why did the composition change so radically over time? How could hydrocarbons be on fire in space, or why would they spontaneously ignite in our atmosphere? How did insect and animal life identical to terrestrial life evolve on Jupiter? How were those insects and animals able to survive both interplanetary space and the oxygen-thin upper atmosphere? If manna was just comet dust why did it did it never fall on the Sabbath? That sort of thing.

Repeated near-collisions of two large planets should be basically impossible. Their orbital paths will either be altered in a way that makes future collisions unlikely, or virtually guaranteed. Once again, Velikovsky’s defense was that he did not believe in gravity.

There is no known mechanism that will allow to planets to get “entangled” with each other and then eventually separate. They would either miss and go on their way with altered orbits, or collide. They wouldn’t play cat-and-mouse with each other for decades.

If the planet had been shrouded in darkness or near-darkness for four decades there would have been an ecological catastrophe similar to a nuclear winter. We’re talking global starvation and famine on an unprecedented scale, a near-extinction of the human race, which is not attested to in anyone’s histories.

If Venus got as close to Earth as Velikovsky claimed — close enough that it passed between the Earth and the Moon, close enough that there were exchanges of material from their atmospheres — Roche’s limit suggests that all three planets should have been torn apart by the stress. (Insert blanket denial of the existence of gravity here.)

Even if such a pass were possible, the distance between the two planets would have been less than 600 miles — Venus would have been the only thing anyone could see in the night sky, and forget geological events and extreme weather, that would cause tidal wives hundreds of miles high and tectonic disturbances that would have wiped all organic life from the surface of the Earth. Even if these effects were orders of magnitude less severe for some reason there should still be massive lava flows and other signs of recent geological upheaval everywhere, and there aren’t.

Adjusting the Earth’s magnetic poles or axis would not necessarily be huge disruption, but would leave traces in the geological record that aren’t present.

Stopping or halting the planet’s rotation would have terrible effects. The planet’s temperature would have been raised so much that the land would bake and the seas would boil away. And then the forces required to restart that rotation would cause just as many problems.

Velikovsky maintained that our encounters with Venus and Mars altered the length of the year from 360 days to 365 days… but the calendars of the ancient world show no such shift. Even the Hebrew calendar claims to have been unchanged for almost six thousand years. If those calendars had been quietly rectified by later generations, it made any attempt to use those calendars to date events before the shift worthless.

He was also unable to explain why, despite some worldwide effects, most of the strangest phenomena were all clustered together in a single small area of the Levant.

Velikovsky claimed that Venus and Mars used to have highly erratic orbits which only became regular at the start of the 1500s. He cites ancient astronomical charts showing their “wanderings” as proof. The people who produced these charts centuries ago cannot be blamed for inaccurate measurements or poor record-keeping or not understanding that the Earth orbited the Sun creating the impression of irregular orbits. Velikovsky, writing in the Twentieth Century, had no such excuse.

Ignoring the actual science, the biggest problems with Velikovsky’s Cosmic Catastrophism are methodological. We’ll get more into that later, but here’s the big thrust of the criticism.

About the only nice thing you can really say about Velikovsky is that he correctly pointed out that a lot of what we took as a given was actually situated on some shaky foundations that should be reexamined. That did not mean that his own ideas were built on firmer foundations.

From a scientific perspective, the biggest problem is that Velikovsky didn’t actually have a hypothesis or premise that can be tested. For the most part he merely recounted what he believed happened, and left it for others to figure out how. This is partly because he had a poor understanding of physics, but mostly because he did not really care about the erratic movements of Venus per se; he was only interested in them so far as he could use them to justify his Revised Chronology. That’s not really how science works — scientists are looking for an underlying idea that can be tested and verified and can be expanded to make other testable and verifiable predictions and therefore expand our understanding of the universe.

Much of the evidence Velikovsky offered for his theory was drawn from mythology. You have to be careful with that sort of evidence. It may hide some sort of truth, but you may also be reading some sort of truth into it that isn’t there. To prove that the Earth stood still he shows that different cultures around the world had various traditions of a “long day” or “long night.” His chosen examples, though, are very selective. They refer to events separated by hundreds if not thousands of years, refer to unusual days and nights that lasted for either a day or a week or a fortnight or a month or forty years, and show none of the geographic consistency you would expect had the Earth actually stopped rotating.

His misunderstanding of mythological sources was often idiosyncratic. For instance, Velikovsky asserts that that the Greeks and Romans associated Minerva with the planet Venus, because both had “sprung forth from Jupiter.” Which, uh, no, they did not. They associated Venus with Venus. It’s in the name.

Velikovsky’s method of argument was circular. He would create a theory of astronomical events based on his interpretation of various texts, and then cite those texts as proof of his interpretation. That’s a no no.

More frustratingly, he works backwards from conclusions and not forwards from data. When he cannot reconcile facts with his conclusions, he changes the facts. If the existing chronology doesn’t line up with the Revised Chronology the existing chronology is wrong. When physics does not support his arguments, physics is wrong. Where sources are inconsistent with his hypothesis, he exaggerates, alters, or misinterprets them. He chooses to interpret poetic and metaphorical statements as fact.

Velikovsky’s choice of sources both historical and scientific was also highly selective. He thought modern scientists and historians were frauds and charlatans because they didn’t agree with him, but had no problems citing works from hundreds of years earlier based on much shakier ground simply because those works happened to align with his personal beliefs. You can’t can’t cherry-pick evidence like that in any field.

He often relied on what was available to the general public in libraries, which often meant sources that were remarkably out of date. When he finally managed to get published the most recent citation in his bibliography dated from some thirty years earlier, in spite of the fact that both archaeology and the physical sciences had made huge strides in the intervening decades.

Finally, Velikovsky was not actually willing to participate in actual debate and criticism. He refused to accept that as the person making extraordinary claims he needed to prove that he was correct; as far he was concerned, everyone else had to prove he was wrong. And more importantly, he contended that they needed to disprove every aspect of his hypothesis — if even a single one of his postulates remained possible, he contended his entire framework was correct.

How do you argue with someone like that?

Badly, it turns out.

Worlds in Collision

Anyway.

Eventually Velikovsky had written two books. Ages in Chaos covered the Revised Chronology, and Worlds in Collision explained Cosmic Catastrophism.

What he did not have was a publisher. Most editors thought the books were poorly written, too esoteric to appeal to a general audience, and too amateurish to appeal to an audience of specialists. Ages in Chaos was turned down by nine publishing houses, and Worlds in Collision by eight.

Velikovsky asked an acquaintance how he could make his work more appealing — and fortunately that acquaintance was Clifton Fadiman, founder of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Fadiman gave Velikovsky some advice on how to improve his prose and structure his arguments for a general audience. Fadiman also suggested that Velikovsky reach out to scientists and historians with the hope of either getting a blurb from them, or suggestions on how to improve the rigor of his work.

Velikovsky thought that was great advice, so in April 1946 he met with Harlow Shapley, the director of Harvard College Observatory. He presented a very high-level version of his Cosmic Catastrophism hypothesis to Shapley, and suggested his theories could be proved by a simple spectrographic analysis of Venus’s atmosphere, and asked Shapley to do one.

Shapley thought the idea was worth investigating, if only to disprove it. As he later wrote to a colleague…

If in historical times there have been these changes in the structure of the solar system, in spite of the fact that our celestial mechanics has been for scores of years able to specify without question the position and motions of the members of the planetary system for many millennia fore and aft, then the laws of Newton are false… In other words, if Dr. Velikovsky is right, the rest of us are crazy.

Shapley had bigger concerns at the time. Under normal circumstance he would have happily taken the time to disprove a crackpot’s hypothesis, but he felt that such activity could be spun in a way that would damage his reputation and the reputation of Harvard University. So he foisted off Velikovsky to some junior colleagues: Walter S. Adams of the Mt. Wilson Observatory and Rupert Wildt of McCormick Observatory. They were also very polite with Velikovsky but told him that there was no real way to prove his hypothesis — the technology was just not there yet.

Other experts Velikovsky consulted were kinder. John J. O’Neill, the science editor of the New York Herald Tribune, thought that the basic idea was original and interesting, if poorly-explained and not entirely thought through. Gordon Atwater, the curator of the Hayden Planetarium, was more effusive: he declared that “the theories presented by Dr. Velikovsky are unique and should be presented to the world of science in order that the underpinning of modern science can be re-examined,” and began to work them into an upcoming program.

This tepid praise was enough to persuade James Putnam of MacMillan & Sons that Worlds in Collision was worth publishing. He purchased the manuscript and began firing up the hype machine.

The January 1950 issue of Harper’s featured “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” a very high-level summary of Cosmic Catastrophism focusing specifically on the Plains of Gibeon. The February and March issues of Colliers featured a series of excerpts in articles entitled “The Heavens Burst.”

Mind you, getting those articles published was, by all accounts, like pulling teeth. Velikovsky did not want his work to be summarized because he wanted complete control over its presentation. A Colliers editor later recalled…

He was infuriated by everything, by our introduction, by our excerpting, by our footnoting. All because we did not present his stuff as unquestioned truth supplanting all previous erroneous theories… He was not only a supreme egomaniac, but he was evangelical about it… He was a pretty good paranoiac, too…. finally he leapt from the table when I was being insistent on one point and came back with a pistol or revolver, which he placed on the table beside him, saying something like, “Now we’ll see how this will be handled.”

Perhaps because of Velikovsky’s refusal to compromise, other publications settled for simple advance notices and short glowing blurbs.

• Newsweek called Worlds In Collision one of the most intriguing books of the year.
• A reviewer for The Encyclopedia of Social Sciences said “the vigor of the scientific imagination, the boldness of construction and the range of inquiry and information fill me with admiration.”
• Ted Thackrey of The New York Compass gushed that Velikovsky’s discoveries “may well rank him in contemporary and future history with Galileo, Newton, Planck, Kepler, Darwin, Einstein…”

The American public liked what they were seeing, especially Christians, who began thinking of Velikovsky’s book as another in a long line of works proving the literal truth of the Biblical narrative. This offended Velikovsky, who was no Biblical literalist. Oh, sure, he believed the history parts were accurate, but he was also a materialist who thought every supernatural occurrence had a rational scientific explanation and had very carefully avoided the subject of religion in his writing.

Meanwhile the scientific community was flabbergasted. Why was the media going out of its way to promote the crazy ideas of an obvious crank?

Harlow Shapley became the point man for a growing anti-Velikovsky movement, which started to put pressure on the book’s publisher by threatening to boycott its other products. It was a smart move, because MacMillan & Sons was the nation’s largest publisher of science textbooks, which accounted for some 70% of its total revenue. MacMillan had a lot to lose, so they hurriedly conducted a second round of review which… well, it wasn’t great either.

• Edward Thorndyke of Queens College thought the book would be an interesting read for laymen but also said that Velikovsky’s scholarship was lacking and his scientific theories were ridiculous.
• C.W. van der Merwe of New York University couldn’t decide whether it was science fiction or fictional science, but wouldn’t say one way or the other whether it deserved to be published.
• Clarence S. Sherman of Cooper Union said it looked okay to him, but to be fair, he the only reviewer who wasn’t a physicist.

A certain sort of pattern developed among the books’ critics. They could see that the parts that discussed their areas of expertise were awful, but were charmed by the parts that discussed other fields — scientists thought the science was garbage but the history was interesting, and historians thought the history was garbage but the science was interesting. Because no one could speak to the entirety of Velikovsky’s theory, no one was willing to condemn the whole thing.

Anyway, that failure to condemn the whole thing was good enough for MacMillan. It defended its decision to publish Worlds in Collision by stressing that they had a right to publish theories, even unpopular ones; attempting to downplay the influence of Velikovsky and his theories; and stressing that the book was not being published by the textbook department but the trade department.

Worlds in Collision was finally released in April 1950. The reviews were not nearly as kind as the promotional push might have led you to believe. Both technical and non-technical reviewers pointed out how Velikovsky had made basic historical and scientific errors.

That had no effect on sales. It turns out the scientists had created a real “Passion of St. Tibulus” situation. The controversy turned Worlds in Collision into a best-seller.

But as the summer ground on it became clear that the scientists were not going to back down. Their constant criticism managed to get Gordon Atwater fired from his job at the Hayden Planetarium, and he would never work in science again.

It also became clear that they were more than willing to pull the gun on their textbook boycott. With the fall college term rapidly approaching MacMillan panicked. First it fired editor James Putnam, who had purchased the manuscript (and who found a new job almost immediately). Then it sold the book to Doubleday, who has happy to get a best-seller without having to do any of the hard work of editing or publicizing the book.

This didn’t really solve the problem — the book had been published, the theory was still out there — but at least it made it someone else’s problem.

Velikovsky did push back. “An Answer to My Critics” appeared in the June 1951 issue of Harper’s, which did not actually answer his critics but just reiterated Velikovsky’s position and call anyone who disagreed with him a fool. It was accompanied by a rebuttal by Prof. John Stewart of Princeton, who politely pointed out once again that Velikovsky’s “theory” did not comport with any known physical laws, and then another rebuttal by Velikovsky asserting that the exact mechanism of celestial mechanics was not his problem and trying to handwave it all away with electromagnetism.

Eventually the scientists seemed to have won. Or at least, after the initial surge of interest, media coverage of Worlds in Collision tended to be uniformly negative.

As far as the scientific community was concerned, the final word on the subject was a paper by Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, presented at the April 1952 meeting of the American Philosophical Society, that systematically demolished most of Velikovsky’s scientific claims. Velikovsky crashed the meeting and demanded that he be allowed to make a rebuttal. Which as usual turned out to be more of a rant which did not actually rebut any of the criticisms leveled against him.

A conference attendee confidently declared that “[Velikovsky] is probably a nova and will soon fade to the dim status of an historical instance of the instability of an intense implausible conviction.”

Oh, man, how wrong he was.

Earth in Upheaval

Worlds in Collision couldn’t be a best-seller forever. The publishing hype cycle moved on to the next book in the queue, and the theory and the controversy were quickly forgotten.

Velikovsky made a few semi-successful attempts to build on his newfound notoriety.

Ages in Chaos eventually found a publisher and sunk like a stone — turns out the folks who were interested in planets caroming around the heavens like billiard balls were not interested in a tedious dissection of ancient genealogies. (Two more volumes of Ages in Chaos were not published until decades later, extending the Revised Chronology all the way to the 26th Dynasty, and Velikovsk y was working on two more volumes at the time of his death that would have taken the Revised Chronology all the way up to the Bronze Age collapse.)

A third book, Earth in Upheaval, attempted to shore up Cosmic Catastrophism by attacking the idea of uniformitarianism. It sold better but did not really convince many people — mostly because it attacks a cartoonish straw man version of uniformitarianism that hadn’t been widely believed for hundreds of years. (Uniformitarianism doesn’t deny the existence or of rapid change or the influence of catastrophes — all it says is that the in the absence of other evidence we can safely assume the forces in the present are identical to the forces in play in the past.)

As part of the run-up to Earth in Upheaval, Velikovsky reached out to his old friend Albert Einstein, asking for a blurb, and proposing a series of experiments that would prove his hypothesis. Einstein gave his old friend one of the politest and most encouraging refusals I’ve ever heard:

The proof of sudden changes is quite convincing and meritorious… 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.

Behind Velikovksy’s back, Einstein was more direct.

He is certainly gifted, but crazy.

Then, an odd thing happened. As space exploration ramped up in the 1950s and 1960s, it turned out that some of the things Velikovsky had predicted were actually true. Here’s just a quick sample of the greatest hits:

• That the solar system had its own magnetic field.
• That Earth had radiation belts, and its magnetic field had changed orientation repeatedly.
• That Earth’s rotation could be altered by magnetism and solar flares.
• That the Moon and Mars were geologically active.
• That Venus would be hot, with an atmosphere containing hydrocarbons.
• That Jupiter emitted radio noises.

He was right about all of these things. But with a big asterisk.

First, Velikovsky wasn’t some lone voice in the wilderness making extraordinary claims. Many of the topics he weighed in on were the subject of vigorous scientific debate. Yes, many of Velikovsky’s harshest critics had picked the wrong sides in those debates, but Velikovsky was not the only person on the other side. He was just the only person on that side unwilling to back up his claims in a scientific manner.

Second, it is mistaken to call what Velikovsky did prediction. He did not have any sort of coherent hypothesis that was informing his guesses. He was working purely off of intuition. Well, intuition, and skimming current scientific literature and cherrypicking ideas that seemed to agree with him.

It is also worth noting that Velikovsky’s guesses were often right in general while being wrong on all the specifics. Earth’s rotation is affected by magnetism, but to an infinitesimally small degree that it can be ignored. The Moon and Mars are not not nearly as geologically active as he predicted. Venus is hot but does not give off more energy than it gets from the sun. Venus also doesn’t actually have hydrocarbons in the atmosphere exactly — NASA scientists just used that term because they were worried the more technically correct “organic compounds” would lead to a million mistaken assumptions about extraterrestrial life. Jupiter does emit radio waves but that simplistic statement was the entirety of Velikovsky’s prediction — he could not say why it emitted radio waves or what type of radio waves they would be. And so on.

Also, when Velikovsky was wrong he was really wrong. He stated that the Moon had been covered by water and claimed that craters were caused not by asteroid strikes but by interplanetary lightning bolts. He stated that Mars was hot and it definitely isn’t. And most of the things he had been wrong about were already known to be incorrect before the publication of Worlds in Collision.

When Velikovsky’s predictions were disproven, he did not go back and revise his hypothesis to account for the new data. Instead he dug in, declaring the new evidence was somehow flawed. He even wrote an introduction for new editions of Worlds in Collision which not only refused to take new evidence into account, but refused to alter a single word of his books ever for any reason.

Perfect example: in 1964 he managed to get a hold of some material from King Tut’s tomb and have it carbon dated. The tests did show that the material was younger than historians had believed — but not only were the results within the margin of error, they were not nearly as young as Velikovsky needed them to be to fit in with his Revised Chronology, which was well outside the margin of error. When carbon dating became more common and tests disproving the Revised Chronology started to pile up, Velikovsky first responded by dismissing the results out of hand and then claiming that Venus had also showered the planet with radioactivity in a way that made tests completely unreliable.

By the end of the 1960s the potential for failure made Velikovsky skittish. At one point he co-founded The Foundation for the Studies of Modern Science (FOSMOS), with the intention of doing archaeological digs that would prove the accuracy of the Revised Chronology. Velikovsky eventually separated from the group, causing its collapse, because he decided he would rather his theories be unproven than disproven.

While science was simultaneously strengthening and weakening Velikovsky’s arguments, a strange thing was happening on campus. The counter-culture embraced Velikovsky’s theories, and so-called “free-thinkers” began seeing him not as a crank or a crackpot but as a persecuted martyr.

The ball had started rolling years earlier, when Newsweek published the article “Professors as Suppressors” in their July 5, 1950 issue. To scientists and academics the whole affair seemed rather cut and dry — Velikovsky was making extraordinary claims, the evidence he was using to back them up was not acceptable, and therefore his ideas were not worthy of serious discussion. Outsiders saw the matter differently — to them it seemed like Velikovsky was being oppressed merely for asking questions. That made Velikovsky especially sympathetic to publishers and pundits and civil libertarians, who were only concerned with matter from a free speech perspective.

Then in the mid-1960s a group of social scientists took up Velikovsky’s cause and attempted to reframe the debate. To them this was no longer a matter of strict scientific truth. It was about fairness, it was about who got to play gatekeeper, about what sort of evidence could be accepted as valid, about the very culture of science itself.

Some of them believed that Velikovsky’s “heresy” was that he rejected the concept of uniformitarianism over the timescale of human history. That he threatened to re-open areas of settled science, forcing scientists to reexamine their default assumptions.

Others had an axe to grind with science itself, partly as a reaction to the increasing scientification and professionalism of their chosen fields. They argued that Velikovsky had constructed his arguments using well-established non-scientific frameworks — historical, sociological, psychoanalytical — and that scientists were wrong to dismiss out of hand.

Still more just thought the scientists had been imperious in their dismissal of Velikovsky because he refused to play along with their little club and its rules. (My sympathies are with the scientists. Have you ever argued with someone on the Internet who dismisses all your arguments out of hand and cannot be reasoned with? That’s Velikovsky. You can see why scientists took the expedient way out of calling him a crackpot and moving on with their lives.)

It’s hard to say that these new advocates were wrong, entirely. They certainly had points. Uniformitarianism, for instance, is an assumption, not a proven theory, but the evidence for it in historic times is far stronger than Velikovsky’s side would have you believe. We can use ancient astronomical and astrological observations to do retrocalculation of orbits to a fairly accurate degree and while it’s possible the laws of gravity changed at some point in the last four thousand years there’s no real reason to assume that.

Velikovsky supporter Riki Dolby had perhaps the best summation of the entire kerfuffle…

The Velikovsky affair is still dominated by unconstructive polemic between the two sides. The differences, particularly in standards and methods of argument, are a major source of misunderstanding. The Velikovsky theory makes historical evidence outweigh all else in its argument, while physical science claims great certainty because it is able to make quantitative explanations and predictions in its normal research contexts. In debate, Velikovsky and his supporters act as if small signs of carelessness are sufficient reason to dismiss the comments of critics without further consideration. The physical scientists are much more cavalier about the special arguments they develop as criticisms of Velikovsky, but find Velikovsky’s use of documentary evidence alarmingly indecisive. While such differences in reasoning remain, disagreements readily descend to personal abuse, particularly to accusations of bad faith.

Scientists Confront Velikovsky

Everything came to a head in the early 1970s when the journal Pensée published a special issue on the Velikovsky affair, which proved to be so popular and controversial it essentially took over the entire magazine for the next three years. Velikovsky jumped on the bandwagon by founding the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, which sounds high-minded and noble but was mostly just devoted to proving Velikovsky right and shouting down his critics.

The increasing popularity of Velikovsky’s ideas eventually prodded the American Association for the Advancement of Science into action. They invited Velikovsky to appear at a symposium on his works. Velikovsky was overjoyed, believing that he was finally being accepted into the scientific community. It soon became clear that was not being welcomed, that the scientists were going to dogpile him and debunk him.

He went anyway.

The conference took place on February 25, 1974 at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Guests included Velikovsky (of course); sociologist Norman W. Storer; physicist J. Derral Mulholland; statistician Peter Huber; and astronomer Carl Sagan. It lasted for seven hours.

It did not go well. Velikovsky was better prepared than the scientists and had heard their arguments many times before. It didn’t help that many of the critics were posturing, resorting to straw man arguments and other logical fallacies. But honestly, the real problem was that the physicists had misunderstood the nature of the debate. It was no longer about physics. It was about the nature and culture of science itself.

Sagan was probably the worst offender. He had been allotted thirty minutes to speak but had prepared almost twice the amount of material he could get through in that slot. He skimmed through his remarks, keeping them light and glib, and then left early so he could drive out to Burbank to appear on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

To many observers the debate was a draw. The scientists had largely argued past Velikovsky, and while he failed to address their substantive criticisms he was able to defend himself rhetorically and remain composed.

Velikovsky didn’t need a win, though. All he needed was not to lose. And to non-scientists it sure looked like he had held his own.

Not that many non-scientists would get to see his side of the argument. Both sides had originally agreed to publish a transcript of the symposium, but Sagan wanted to include his full prepared remarks and not the abbreviated version he had been forced give due to time constraints. Velikovsky, sensibly, asked for permission to expand his remarks but the scientists refused to grant it. So they hit an impasse.

In the end Cornell University published only the scientists’ papers in a single volume entitled Scientists Confront Velikovsky. It featured a foreword by Isaac Asimov, who had a lot to say about the controversy over the years… Here’s a summary of his greatest hits.

What does one do with a heretic?

…when a few astronomers denounced the Russian-born American Immanuel Velikovsky, they lent the man (and, by reflection, his followers) an aura of the martyr, which he (and they) assiduously cultivate, though no martyr in the world has ever been harmed so little or helped so much by the denunciations.

I used to think, indeed, that it was entirely the scientific denunciation that had put Velikovsky over the top and that, had the American astronomer Harlow Shapley only had the sang froid to ignore the Velikovskian folly, it would quickly have died a natural death.

I no longer think so. I now have greater faith in the bottomless bag of credulity that human beings carry on their back.

For every Galileo who was right there was a thousand crackpots who were wrong. If Velikovsky were to be right, it wouldn’t be because the establishment opposes him. If that were all, every idiot would be right.

In the end, the debate did not settle anything. As before it backfired, allowing Velikovsky to continue casting himself as a martyr to science. He rode that hard, and enjoyed a few years as a counterculture celebrity before dying in 1979.

In spite of the new interest in Velikovsky’s ideas, they did not develop any further. Partly this is because his supporters were more interested in attacking the scientific establishment than they were in proving Velikovsky right with actual science. Mostly this is because, as stated before, Velikovsky did not have an underlying hypothesis that could be tested or developed further. He was happy to leave the actual hypothesizing to someone else… and since most of his disciples and acolytes were not scientists, they were happy to do the same.

Meanwhile, almost every new development in space science and Near Eastern history disproved another aspect of Velikovsky’s hypothesis. (As if the hypothesis of a man who believed frogs and locusts could pass between planets really needed to be disproved.) By the time I first encountered his writings in the early 1990s, no one cared about Immanuel Velikovsky any more.

No Lessons Learned

So, what if anything can be learned from this whole affair? Possibly it’s how not to debate a crackpot in public.

Is there a right way to deal with a crackpot? Probably not. A talented crackpot can spin any situation to their advantage. After all, this is all they’ve got going for them. It’s why fascists do well at the Munk debates, why Charlie Kirk was able to out-argue cocky but un-prepared college students, why the 20-on-1 Jubilees rarely work out for the twenty.

Pre-publication, scientists took the correct approach to dealing with Velikovsky: feigning mild interest in his theories while politely suggesting that there may have been fundamental flaws in his logic. Post-publication, though, their ham-handed attempts to completely de-platform Velikovsky backfired and gave him a far larger platform.

The scientists also allowed themselves to get frustrated with Velikovsky’s refusal to argue on their terms and allowed the debate to degenerate into ad hominem attacks. Many of Velikovsky’s fiercest critics never even read his works; they were reacting to others’ descriptions of his works. By refusing to engage with Velikovsky’s work directly they allowed him to dance rhetorical circles around them, and in their vituperativeness they ceded the moral high ground in the public eye.

Honestly, the best way to shut this stuff down is at the beginning. Let the book be published, ignore it, and be quickly forgotten. Engaging with it at all is the mistake. It gives it a legitimacy it doesn’t deserve. Seriously, when was the last time you heard about the Comet Kohoutek or the Bible Code? These things die out if you don’t feed them.

And yet here we are seventy five years later, and we still haven’t figured any of this out. If anything the Internet has made it all worse. Welcome to the hellscape of the future, I guess.