A lot for these respected scientists speaking about their respected science on respected tv packages. Able to get f**king loopy?
#7. BONDS OF THE PAST
Bear in mind Immanuel Velikovsky? Should you’re over sixty-five, and if you happen to have been sorta countercultural within the sixties and/or seventies, there’s a great probability that you simply do. Velikovsky was a psychoanalyst by coaching who went on to elaborate some very unusual theories in astronomy and archeology. Unusual— and likewise surprisingly influential, a minimum of in a popular culture sense. Evidently he was buddies with Einstein. And he offered loads of books. (If podcasts had existed again then, he would have been even larger. Think about if we might mix Yuval Noah Harari and Robert Schoch!) Right here’s a bit synopsis from Steven Shapin:
Fifteen hundred years earlier than the beginning of Christ, a bit of stuff blew off the planet Jupiter. That chunk quickly turned an unlimited comet, approaching Earth a number of instances across the interval of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt and Joshua’s siege of Jericho. The following havoc included the momentary stopping and restarting of the Earth’s rotation; the introduction into its crust of natural chemical substances (together with a portion of the world’s petroleum reserves); the parting of the Crimson Sea, induced by an enormous electrical discharge from the comet to Earth; showers of iron mud and edible carbohydrates falling from the comet’s tail, the primary turning the waters pink and the second nourishing the Israelites within the desert; and plagues of vermin, both infecting Earth from organisms carried within the comet’s tail or attributable to the speedy multiplication of earthly toads and bugs induced by the scorching warmth of cometary gases. Finally, the comet settled all the way down to a quieter life because the planet Venus, which, not like the opposite planets, is an ingénue at simply 3500 years outdated. Disturbed by the brand new woman within the neighbourhood, Mars too started behaving badly, carefully encountering Earth a number of instances between the eighth and seventh centuries BCE; triggering large earthquakes, lava flows, tsunamis and atmospheric fireplace storms; inflicting the sudden extinction of many species (together with the mammoth); shifting Earth’s spin axis and relocating the North Pole from Baffin Island to its current place; and abruptly altering the size of the terrestrial yr from 360 to its current 365¼ days. There have been additionally additional shenanigans involving Saturn and Mercury.
So, yeah. It was a factor. A lot in order that the CBC produced a documentary on Velikovsky’s concepts in 1972. That is that documentary. (And sure, the presenter firstly messes up the half about Venus. Venus didn’t hop it’s orbit (per Velikovsky): it started its life as a “comet” and solely later settled all the way down to the extra sedate lifetime of a planet.)