Velikovsky, Catastrophe and Einstein. Einstein was wrong. All hail 'The Science'.
Why no mea culpas from 'The Science'. How clever is 'The Science' in reality?
Staffordshire Sentinel - Tuesday 18 March 1969
The Heretic
Velikovsky wrote many works on ‘catastrophism’, that is the concept that the Earth, the solar system, the universe at large, has been in flux, change and prone to disasters in times not so far distant in the past. Earth in Upheaval is perhaps his best work, giving irrefutable proof of catastrophism around the globe, which is anathema to a society bludgeoned to insensitivity by endless propaganda on long ages, stable states, gentle and unchanging time, evolving mutation-driven-life forms (mutations destroy, they don’t add value), and the Gods of magic species metamorphosis, with the shrew becoming you.
A fair question to ask is, ‘what is real about modern science, and what is propaganda?’ Such a question falls out of the ‘Velikovsky affair’, or the vicious, pagan, bloody assault on a man who simply asked tough questions, and proposed some pretty novel remediations to age old problems. The reaction - fascistic, intolerant, ignorant - paints a picture of science that is the opposite of the public’s facile and naive impression of a cadre of enlightened Olympians, selflessly engaged in the heroic pursuit of knowledge and wisdom.
What is Science?
A key point posed by the ‘controversial’ works of Velikovsky is that of ‘Science’ itself. What is ‘science’? If someone, with excruciating detail, develops a theorem that contradicts the reigning paradigm how should that person be treated? Should they be publicly censored? Humiliated? Delicensed? Prevented from publishing? Attacked verbally and even physically? Killed perhaps? We saw this fascist violence against the ‘other’ during the Corona scamdemic, in which the end of the world was preached over a virus with a death rate of 0.3%, and the ‘only’ solution was a series of experimental mRNA gene therapy stabs which has murdered 3-5x more people than the flu-death rate virus itself.
‘The Science’ vilifying and demonising Velikovsky, was a pre-packaged template used by the modern cults of $cientism to silence dissent and demand compliance.
Velikovksy and his theory of ‘catastrophism’, which as a body of thought and proofs, goes back to the ancient Greeks and was an article of belief in the 19th century promulgated by geologists such as Agassiz and Cuvier, has overwhelming physical support in the real world and in the geology all around us and under our feet. However, ‘The Science’ wedded to the opposite religious belief, sits in judgemental defiance, descrying ‘catastrophe’ as irreligious and outside of its canon and liturgy. ‘The Science’ promotes the unfounded and unproven religion of endless time, with millions-billions-soon trillions of years of cosmological and terrestrial stable, steady-state, once and always perfectly organised and constructed, with no variation or disruption.
Fairy Tales
The clock of Newton, working endlessly and without a change in chronometry. The ‘evolving’ selections of Darwinism, working through endless epochs, competitively driven, with creatures striving in eternal struggle to achieve a material advantage, pushed forward by chance, and directed by the Gods of time, natural selection, and mutations. The wind and rain gently beating down on land to produce sand. The rivers flowing lazily over millions and billions of years to form a canyon. The sun always rising in the east. The axial tilt of the planet always at 23.5% to the vertical mean. The Continents slowly and serenely drifting away, propelled by some unproven motive force. The constellation of planets, forever in their place, forever following the same pattern over billions of years.
Such are the fairy tales proposed by 19th century Victorians Charles Lyell (a lawyer) and Charles Darwin (a pigeon breeder), along with the 17th century polymath Newton who wrote more on scripture than he did on cosmology and physics and who happily admitted his own ignorance when he said that he stood on the shoulders of giants, and who would likely be equally at ease with being wrong.
All of it reads as a bad fiction novel. In fact, it is absolutely embarrassing that our modern ‘Science’ is construed on top of 3 men, their acolytes and cults, whose works if anyone bothers to read the sources, are full of errors, dialogues of doubt, statements without facts, conclusions without experimentation and even in the case of Darwinian theology and its many strands, thrown out as irrelevant. The entire Church of Darwin for example is a shell of nothing else other than word-salads and ‘what-ifs’. Not a single scientific experiment or observation supports species metamorphosis.
It bears repeating, ‘The Science’ vilifying and demonising Velikovsky, was a pre-packaged template used by the modern cults of $cientism to silence dissent and demand compliance. This is the norm and censorship is the future. Who can deny this probability when it is used daily and when the ‘media’ and ‘government’ have erected ‘fact-checkers’, ‘verifiers’ and ‘trusted sources’? Dissent from any of the ‘rules’ and ‘laws’ which you must follow, will not be allowed. The endless rivers of money which flow into and sustain the $cience, have corrupted truth, honesty and inquiry, and it really is as simple as that, a fact confirmed in the warnings issued by Eisenhower and Kennedy.
Einstein and Velikovsky
In order to try and salvage his copious works, Velikovsky turned to a fellow Jew, Einstein. There was a healthy debate and meetings between Velikovsky and Einstein. Einstein was part of the establishment of course, a de facto leader of ‘The Science’. The ‘scientific establishment’ had a nuclear meltdown after Worlds in Collision was published in 1950 with its theme of cosmic catastrophe, and Venus portrayed as the chief villain, a new planet formed from a comet, assaulting and over-turning the Earth. With demonic energy, they sought to destroy Velikovsky. The Russian wrote to, and visited with the German, appealing to him to look at the evidence and defend the right under free speech and scientific inquiry, to promulgate and defend contrarian views, without being slandered and calumnied by the establishment ‘scientific’ elite, most of whom had not bothered to read his works in detail, nor knew much about the sources and arguments they contained.
Einstein was originally hostile to Velikovsky’s challenge against the religious doctrines of Darwinian and Newtonian ‘laws’. After meeting the Russian in Princeton he relented somewhat and admitted that a catastrophe was the only way to explain an Ice Age. He disagreed with the Russian on the details of what sort of ‘catastrophe’ would cause an Ice Age, supporting ‘terrestrial sources’ and the discredited ‘continental drift’ by Wegener as the prime movers in the formation of an Ice Age, without citing sources or proof (you need massive immediate heating of the entire planet, the condensation of 300 or more feet from the oceans into cloud cover, volcanic eruptions, the darkening of the atmosphere, an immediate and overwhelming temperature reduction, and deep cold in the northern and southern latitudes to produce the hail of snow and ice, to form ice sheets).
Einstein could not fathom how the innumerable global-cultural sources used by Velikovsky supported his rather straight-forward idea that an exogenous non-terrestrial force caused not only the ‘miracles’ of the Old Testament, and the ‘shaking’ of the Earth’s core, but the flipping of the poles, an Ice Age or even Ages, the utter destruction of most Bronze age civilisations and the massive world-wide accumulation of preserved dead fauna from vast distances piled up and aggregated together, when these creatures had no geographic connection, with many of these sites hundreds or feet or more above sea level. Like Dr Baffled after seeing younger people die after being stabbinated, Einstein was confused.
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Letter from Einstein to Velikovsky (bold is mine)
22.V.54.
Dear Mr. Velikovsky!
Remarks on the part of your manuscript “poles displaced.”
The first impression is that the generations of scholars have a “bad memory.” Scientists generally have little historical sense, so that each single generation knows little of the struggles and inner difficulties of the former generation. Thus it happens that many ideas at different times are repeatedly conceived anew, without the initiator knowing that these subjects had been considered already before. In this sense I find your patience in examining the literature quite enlightening and valuable; it deserves the attentive consideration of researchers who according to their natural mentality live so much in the present that they are inclined to think of every idea that occurs to them, or their group, as new. The idea of a possible displacement of the poles as an explanation of the change of climate in any one point of the earth’s crust is a beautiful example. Even the idea of the possibility of a sliding of the rigid crust in relation to the plastic, or fluid deeper strata of the earth, was already considered by Lord Kelvin (and was in fact rejected).
The interpretation of the vote mentioned on pp. 159-160 as an attempt at a dogmatic fixation of the “truth” is not obvious to me. It is simply interesting for the participants of a congress to see how opinions concerning an interesting question are divided among those present. I don’t think that the underlying idea was that the outcome of the voting would somehow insure the objective correctness of the outcome of the vote.
From p. 182 on starts a wild robbers’ story (up to p. 189) which seems to rely more on a strong temperament than on organized considerations. Referring to p. 191: Blacket’s idea is untenable from a theoretical point of view. The remark about the strength of magnetization seems to be unjustified (p. 192); it could for example depend essentially upon the speed of cooling as well as on particle shape and size. The direction of the magnetic field during solidification must however quite certainly determine the direction of magnetization. Bottom 192 etc.: wild fantasy! from here on marginal remarks with pencil in the manuscript.
The proof of “sudden” changes (p. 223 to the end) is quite convincing and meritorious. If you had done nothing else but to gather and present in a clear way this mass of evidence, you would have already a considerable merit. 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. He can easily come to the opinion that you yourself don’t believe it, and that you want only to mislead the public. I myself had originally thought that it could be so. This can explain Shapley’s behavior, but in no case excuse it. This is the intolerance and arrogance together with brutality which one often finds in successful people, but especially in successful Americans. The offence against truthfulness, to which you rightly called my attention, is generally human, and in my eyes, less important. One must however give him credit that in the political arena he conducted himself courageously and independently, and just about carried his hide to the marketplace.
Therefore it is more or less justified if we spread the mantle of Jewish neighborly love over him, difficult as it may be.
To the point, I can say in short: catastrophes yes, Venus no. Now I ask you: what do you mean when you request of me to do my duty in this case? It is not clear to me. Be quite frank and open towards me, this can only be good in every respect.
With cordial greetings to both of you,
Your
A. Einstein.
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Einstein admits that the ‘establishment’ is arrogant and probably not that clever. So how clever was Einstein? He was demonstrably intelligent, but like any human, also a prisoner of world views and pressures. Abstract mathematics aside, even his theories of relativity are undergoing revision and his search for a unified theory was a failure. He did accept some aspect of catastrophism. But he refused to even consider some probable causes.
Einstein’s Ignorance
Einstein’s dismissal of electro-magnetism is for example unscientific. It is a well-known fact that planets do emit electro-magnetism (our own planet has an electro-magnetic sphere which stretches out some 200.000 miles). Velikovsky did not state that Mars or Venus in their present position would emit a discharge to disrupt the Earth. He stated that Venus or Mars, if they came close enough could emit electrical discharges which could affect our atmosphere.
There is nothing in ‘the science’ which disproves inter-planetary electrical discharges as a workable theory, and precious little in ‘the science’ to experiment such a concept and either confirm or deny it. Solar flares are well known, as are cosmic ray flares. A planetary discharge should not be so easily ruled out. In the mid-1990s, Jupiter was hit by a series of comets, which tore Earth sized holes in the planet. One assumes there were many discharges into space from the surface. A similar event with a planet closer to Earth might well impact the atmosphere. In fact, NASA admits to the possibility, a fact little understood now or in 1950.
Solar wind variations can disturb it (the magnetosphere), leading to “space weather” -- geomagnetic storms that can penetrate our atmosphere, threatening spacecraft and astronauts, disrupting navigation systems and wreaking havoc on power grids. On the positive side, these storms also produce Earth’s spectacular aurora. The solar wind creates temporary cracks in the shield, allowing some energy to penetrate down to Earth’s surface daily. Since these intrusions are brief, however, they don’t cause significant issues. https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3105/earths-magnetosphere-protecting-our-planet-from-harmful-space-energy/
NASA however, also states that poles flipping, do occur over hundreds and thousands of years, and there have been 183 such occurrences in the recent endless millions of years in their calculations – a very precise number. Happily, NASA informs us that the climate is the hottest evah! but the solar and cosmic impacts are not its causation. Nothing much has really changed since 1950, just the endless ‘studies’ have gotten larger and the assumptions and calculations more arcane.
Einstein also objected to ‘radio signals’ sent by planets which Velikovsky proposed and which again, can be easily tested and refuted. Einstein was simply regurgitating what he knew in 1950. Now NASA admits that planets do emit radio signals.
Astronomical objects that have a changing magnetic field can produce radio waves. The radio astronomy instrument called WAVES on the WIND spacecraft recorded a day of bursts of radio waves from the Sun's corona and planets in our solar system.
Data pictured below show emissions from a variety of sources including radio bursts from the Sun, the Earth, and even from Jupiter's ionosphere whose wavelengths measure about fifteen meters in length. The far right of this graph shows radio bursts from the Sun caused by electrons that have been ejected into space during solar flares moving at 20% of the speed of light.
The emissions from Jupiter are quite strong. If Venus is a new planet, in times past when it was formed from a comet, its signals, radioactivity and discharges may have been more prevalent and active. There is nothing about planetary electrical discharges or radio emissions, which is unscientific, or should be dismissed out of hand.
Velikovsky’s reaction to Einstein’s letter was to take 3 weeks to write a response and then not to send the letter. Einstein had admitted that catastrophe was the way forward but did not believe Venus or a cosmological intercession had much to do with it. Einstein visited Velikovsky, read his unsent letter and promised to engage in a discussion. The essence of Velikovsky’s unsent letter is in this paragraph:
The real cause of indignation against my theory of global catastrophes is the implication that celestial bodies may be charged. It was argued that only an astronomer can imagine the degree of coincidence between the calculations based on the gravitational theory and the observed planetary motions. But this very degree of coincidence is disturbing in the face of many facts known about the sun (behavior of protuberances), the planets (influence of radio-transmission), the comets (self-illuminating; behavior of tails), the fixed stars (strong magnets), the meteorites (magnets). Even for the cases of observed anomalies magnetic or electric charges were not considered, as if they were a tabu in celestial mechanics. Of the many unexplained phenomena presented in my address before the Forum of the Graduate College, you have explained only the apparent spherical form of the sun (and was it correct to disregard the very low atmospheric pressure on the sun in calculating its expected shape?), but not why the sun rotates quicker on the equator, nor many other similar violations of mechanical laws.
$cientism
Nothing in the above has been disproven by ‘The Science’, in fact quite the opposite. The statements by Velikovsky have been proven correct. So why no mea-culpa from ‘The Science’? No humility? No room for assessment and reflection?
Massive floods, volcanic activity, marine fossils on Everest, proofs that mountains are young, all were too much for Einstein, who apparently died with an open copy of Worlds in Collison on his desk. The religion of Darwin and Newton, hiding behind hand waving and ‘laws’, pilloried Velikovsky, psychologically and physically threatening him. They mocked him, caricatured him, cherry picked fragments of his theory and demonised them, never engaging in debate, open discourse, and never displaying a hint of tolerance or curiosity. $cientism.
Einstein’s refrain of objection is still followed by ‘The Science’ in 2023. Endless time is religious gospel.
Yes the priests say, poles do slip and flip and some ‘catastrophes’ happen but they take hundreds of thousands, probably millions of years and they are entirely terrestrial and of course we understand everything about them.
Yes, the priests say, evolution is a fact, and who knows, maybe there is life on Mars or a super race of dinosaurs winged and flying on Venus.
Yes, the priests say, the Rona virus was a rounding error, but you need not one, but five injections of mRNA gene therapy to protect yourself, granny and the world, along with wearing a face diaper and being imprisoned.
Yes, the priests say, our temperature records go back 150 years in just a few locations, but we know that this spring is the hottest spring ever, and it is caused by man’s 5% contribution of plant food, which is 0.04% of atmospheric gas by weight, that Gaia’s 95% contribution and the auto-recycling of 98% of plant food has no impact on the greatest catastrophe in history, caused by man.
We know this because we are ‘The Science’.
$cientism today preaches that there are no natural or cosmological catastrophes – just man-created disasters. Fantasy is now reality. The treatment and evisceration of Velikovsky was a harbinger of the Fascism embedded in $cientism. There is no tolerance for any dissent.