James P. Hogan Kicking the Sacred Cow

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any such effect.
Toward the end of his paper, Michelson mentioned a "curious but tantalizing"
finding of his: that the energy required to turn the Earth's rotational axis
through 180corresponded closely to estimates of a
�
single moderately strong geomagnetic storm that could be triggered by a solar
flare in the way the energy of a bomb is triggered by the small energy release
of a detonator. Evidently missing the point, Mulholland scoffed at the idea,
pointing out that since 10 times as much energy is emitted by a solar flare
8
as is intercepted by the Earth, Michelson's result was in error by that
amount. When Michelson responded wearily, "I'll let that go," his remark was
widely misinterpreted as meaning that he had no answer. A stormy exchange of
correspondence resulted subsequently with the editorial department of
Science
, who tried to suppress a letter from Michelson straightening out the error.
Dr. Robert Bass, who had been a keen observer of the whole affair for some
years, wrote a concise reply to a number of the points that Mulholland had
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raised in the day and requested time to present them at the same evening
session, which was supposedly open to all. He was told that this wouldn't be
allowed since the public might become confused if a noted authority disagreed
with the expert chosen by the committee.
Well, at least we can be comforted that the organizers hadn't forgotten their
commitment to education.
Carl Sagan: The Star Billing
And then there was Dr. Carl Sagan. . . . How to begin here?
Professor Lynn Rose records that in January 1974, when arrangements for the
symposium were being finalized, he commented in a letter to Stephen Talbott at
Pens�e that Sagan delivered errors and
untruths at a rate faster than it would be possible to list in the time
Velikovsky was being given, let alone be able to refute them. In a tape of a
lecture by Sagan at Cornell in March 1973 entitled "Venus and
Velikovsky," Rose timed them at three or four per minute, giving a grand total
of several score. His review of them appeared some years later in the journal
The Velikovskian
, edited by Charles Ginenthal.
126
Sagan's perspective on the subject can perhaps be judged from his statement in
Broca's Brain
, published five years after the symposium: "Catastrophism began largely in
the minds of those geologists who accepted a literal interpretation of the
Book of Genesis, and in particular, the account of the Noahic flood." Even
after the time that had been given to reflect, as far as Sagan was concerned
all questioning
127
of accepted theory originated in the minds of the implicitly deluded, to
justify religious convictions.
No possibility exists that it could have originated in the form of real events
in the real universe before anything at all was written. On page 126 he goes
on, "Velikovsky attempts to rescue not only religion but also astrology."
Hence, the question of a scientific debate never arose. The presumption of
fighting an evangelical crusade was written into the ground rules from the
beginning, and when saving souls from heresy is at stake, winning is the only
thing that counts, at whatever cost and by any means. Robert Anton Wilson
writes:
"Sagan likes to quote a 'distinguished professor of Semitics' who told him no
Semitic scholars take
Dr. Velikovsky very seriously. . . . [T]his 'distinguished professor' remains
anonymous, and thus Sagan's hearsay about him would get thrown out of any
civilized court. Three distinguished professors of Semitic studies, however,
have all shown cordial support for Dr. Velikovsky: Prof. Claude F. A.
Schaeffer, Prof. Etienne Droiton, and Prof. Robert Pfeiffer. Look them up in
any
Who's Who of Semitic studies, archeology and Egyptology. They have a lot more
prestige in those fields than Sagan's Prof.
Anonymous, who doesn't have a single entry under his name anywhere . . ."
128
At the San Francisco symposium, Sagan presented ten problems, which he
referred to as
"plagues," with Velikovsky's proposals. Ginenthal's book (1995) that I cited
near the beginning is a compilation and rebuttal of the errors, evasions,
denials of evidence, and self-contradictions that took the author eight years
of research and occupies 447 pages. I will touch on all of them, elaborating
on just a few.
Sagan on Astronomy
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Problem 1. The Ejection of Venus by Jupiter
Sagan stated that "Velikovsky's hypothesis begins with an event that has never
been observed by astronomers and that is inconsistent with much that we know
about planetary and cometary physics, namely the ejection of an object of
planetary dimensions from Jupiter."
One wonders who, exactly, the "we" in the authoritarian "we know" is, since
the literature makes it clear that the scientific community didn't pretend to
know, and nothing much in that respect has changed since. As related above,
grave doubts had been cast on the fashionable tidal and accretion theories of
Solar System formation, and such figures as McCrea and Lyttleton couldn't have
been among the "we"
who "knew," since the fission theory that their work (among others) pointed to
emerged as an alternative that was consistent with planetary physics. And the
reason for their conclusions? Gravitational theory
precisely what Velikovsky was accused of not understanding or ignoring. But he
was fully conversant with Lyttleton's work, which he had cited in "Venus A
Youthful Planet" seven years previously. Sagan also produced figures for
energy and heat generation showing that a volcanic eruption on Jupiter
couldn't have ejected an object resembling Venus, which was all neither here
nor there because Velikovsky never said that a volcanic eruption had.
Sagan went on: "From the fact that the apehelia (greatest distances from the
Sun) of the orbits of short-period comets have a statistical tendency to lie
near Jupiter, Laplace and other early astronomers hypothesized that Jupiter
was the source of such comets. This is an unnecessary hypothesis because we
now know [again] that long-period comets may be transferred to short-period
trajectories by the
perturbations of Jupiter."
Later in the same year that Sagan said this, the International Astronomical
Union held its twenty-fifth colloquium at Greenbelt, Maryland. In the
Proceedings
, a paper by Edgar Everhart entitled
"The Evolution of Cometary Orbits" states that: "
Although it is possible for an orbit of short-period to be the result after a
parabolic comet makes a single close encounter with Jupiter, this mechanism
does not explain the existence of the short-period comets
. This was shown by H. A. Newton
(1893). Not wanting to believe his results, and being a little dubious about
Newton's procedures, I redid the problem as a numerical experiment and came to
exactly the same conclusion." [Emphasis in the original]
129
So ever since 1893 there had been people who not only didn't "know," but found
such a transfer model unsupported by the evidence. The main problem is that it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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