Worlds in collision

In 1950, scientists did something that later shamed many in the isolated world of towering intellects...

The cause of this wickedness was a set of radical ideas developed by a Russian born psychiatrist who numbered Albert Einstein among his friends.  Immanuel Velikovsky, MD, was no specialist in the fields of astronomy and physics.  He was a doctor who sought to heal minds.  And he was also a man who labored mightily to reconcile his belief in the truth of legends of his ancestors as recorded in the Biblical book of Exodus with a lack of corroborating accounts in the records of the Egyptians who had enslaved those forbearers...

Velikovsky's solution to the problem was a new cosmology and a new chronology for the history of ancient Israel...

Prior to roughly 1500 years before the era common to Jews and Christians, Velikovsky postulated, the planet Venus did not exist.  Disturbances inside Jupiter caused the largest non-solar member of our solar system to eject a comet-like object that almost collided with our Earth.  This resulted in almost unimaginable havoc on our world, creating disasters that became part of the myths and legends of people around the world.  The comet that would become Venus passed by at the very moment Moses raised his staff on the shores of the Red Sea, causing the waters to part as if by the hand of God Himself.  Fifty two years later, still not settled into its future orbit, Venus careened past Earth again, in time to cause the Sun to apparently stand still as Joshua fought the battle of Jericho...



Worlds in Collision, a French edition



That Immanuel Velikovsky had done a tremendous amount of research was never doubted by his critics.  None disputed either his sincerity or willingness to work with the scientific establishment.  As early as four years before the publication of Worlds in Collision, the physician who dabbled in planetary physics had written to several of the world's leading astronomers, outlining his ideas and requesting their views... 

Unfortunately,  his notions ran afoul of basic laws of physics regarding the conservation of energy and angular momentum, a fact essentially relegating Velikovsky's cosmology to the sizeable realm of interesting but impossible hypotheses...

Velikovsky's theory would likely have faced opposition from other quarters in the scientific community even if astronomers and physicists hadn't had problems with it.  Essentially, the good doctor had proposed catastrophism.  This notion didn't set well with geologists in the late 1940s or early 1950s.  Prevailing doctrine had it the earth's landforms developed gradually, over millions of years.  Few would ally themselves with a non-specialist who explained the current lack of a continent called Atlantis as the result of a catastrophic event.  It didn't help matters when Velikovsky concluded the main flaw in Plato's account of the lost continent was the Greek philosopher misdating its destruction by 8100 years...




 

Advance publicity for Velikovsky's book hinted it would do well in stores.  Newsweek magazine discussed its ideas in a January 1950 article.  In March, Reader's Digest brought it to the attention of millions more...

None of this pleased Harlow Shapley, an astronomer at Harvard University, who led a campaign by America's scientific community urging the MacMillan publishing house to drop Worlds in Collision from its spring list.  The firm saw no good reason to do so and put Velikovsky's book in stores in March, 1950, including it in a list of "Science" titles.  At this point, Shapley and his followers announced plans to withdraw their own works from MacMillan's catalog and to boycott the publishing giant's textbooks, until its editors booted unscientific nonsense from the marketplace of ideas.  The financial pressure was too great for a firm heavily invested in the educational market.  Reluctantly, it transferred rights to Worlds in Collision to Doubleday, a mass market behemoth that neither depended on the good will of the intellectual elite nor cared one way or another about having it...

Worlds in Collision met Doubleday's expectations.  Rapidly rising to bestseller status, the book's success justified publication of subsequent titles by Velikovsky, including Ages in Chaos and Earth in Upheaval.  Here, as with his first book, the good doctor relied heavily on ancient manuscripts to develop a bold new timeline of human history, interpreting data as it proved useful to his cosmology.  For his comet theory to coincide with Biblical history, Velikovsky decided the Exodus of slaves from Egypt took place during the collapse of the Middle Kingdom.  This date, incidentally, solved the mystery of the Queen of Sheba-- Solomon's regal temptress could be none other than the female pharaoh Hatshepshut...

Immanuel Velikovsky, MD

In the end, Velikovsky suffered the ire of scientists and religious fundamentalists.  He managed to question the legitimacy of almost every scholarly endeavor, adding biologists to his critics when he used Earth in Upheaval to assault Darwin's theories of evolution.  For those who read the Bible literally, he had pitched camp with godless atheism by replacing Yahweh with a comet...    

Years later, many prominent scientists and science writers criticized the foolishness of an earlier generation.  Among them were astronomer Carl Sagan and polymath Isaac Asimov who felt uncomfortable with the idea of censoring a theory that failed to conform to current notions of scientific or historic truth.  Some of his original critics would lie and claim they had not been amongst those who pressured MacMillan to drop Worlds in Collision...




 

 

Among his contemporaries, perhaps the most courageous was Gordon Atwater, Director of the Hayden Planetarium and Chairman of the Astronomy Department for the Museum of Natural History.  Atwater publicly supported Velikovsky's right to pursue unorthodox ideas... 


Fired from his job and effectively blacklisted from academia for the rest of his life, the man who had been listed in Who's Who In America never regretted his support of intellectual freedom...

Solomon and Sheba

Note: Photographs of the French edition of Worlds in Collision and Immanuel Velikovsky and painting of Hatshepshut as the Queen of Sheba were obtained through Google Images without additional information regarding copyright or original source.  Black and white photographs of Torrey Yucca and California coastline are copyrighted by Louis R Nugent.