854ce95c   
   XPost: alt.religion.druid, soc.culture.irish, ie.general   
   XPost: alt.traditional.witchcraft   
   From: weland@faeroes.freeshell.org   
      
   > When people criticise Immanuel Velikovsky, they issue vague   
   > generalisations or argue about peripheral non-essential details.   
   > Specifics, please.   
   > What sources did Velikovsky not get right?   
      
   His mythological sources, in the first place. His method of deriving   
   celestial mechanics scenarios from legends is simply bogus -- space   
   objects behave according to simple laws of physics, not mythological   
   tales. He also carefully picked only those myths that happened to   
   be consistent wih his hypothesis. This is a gross misuse of literary   
   sources.   
      
   > What experimental findings disprove his ideas?   
      
   It takes only highschool-level physics to notice that the orbits he   
   proposes in "Worlds in Collision" are physically impossible, so this   
   essentially boils down to the experiments of Newton and Gallilei that   
   showed conservation of momentum.   
      
   His ideas of catastrophic, wide-scale destructions have been infirmed   
   by ice-core studies, which simply showed that nothing like what he   
   proposed ever happened in the Holocene.   
      
   > What are your sources for what you just said?   
      
   The source of my first two statements are simply Velikovsky's books.   
   I'm not a physicist myself, but reasonable close (engineer) so I know   
   enough physics to be able to check if you can actually have such   
   orbits. Harlow Shapley (who is an actual astronomer) was the first to   
   notice that if my memory saves me right. Carl Sagan also commented on   
   his use of the sources, and please don't start buzzing about how he   
   never debated Velikovsky in person -- the arguments are just as rele-   
   vant on paperback as they are when told face-to-face. Peter James also   
   rebuts Velikovsky's chronology in the preface from the Centuries of   
   Darkness. As for the matter of the global destruction, any book on   
   geology or physical geography will do.   
      
   Please note that I'm not talking about ice-breaking scientific disco-   
   veries. For instance, it takes little more than basic familiarity with   
   celestial mechanics and solar system astronomy to check most of Veli-   
   kovsky's astronomy-related claims. These aren't new or difficult things   
   but they are not "common knowledge" -- you can be a good scientist and   
   not know them because they simply aren't in your field (most biologists,   
   for instance, are probably not too familiar with them). If you don't even   
   know they exist, it's very easy to ignore them.   
      
   --   
   weland@sdf.org   
   SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.org   
   % grep me no patterns and I'll tell you no lines   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)