Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

WORLDS IN DERISION 175
Many people avidly read Worlds in Collision, putting it on the
bestseller list soon after it came out. It was a counterculture smash
in the 1960s and ’70s. His popularity is waning now, but Velikovsky
still has many followers, many of whom fiercely defend his
notions.
What are these notions? The basic premise espoused by Velikovsky
is that the planet Venus was not formed at the same time as
the other planets in our solar system. Instead, he concludes it was
formed recently, only a few thousand years ago, around the year
1500 b.c. According to Velikovsky’s analysis of the Bible and other
ancient tomes, Venus was originally part of the planet Jupiter,
which somehow split apart, ejecting Venus bodily as a huge comet.
Over the ensuing several centuries, Venus careened around the
solar system, encountering the Earth and Mars multiple times,
affecting them profoundly. It was the gravity and electromagnetic
effects of these near passes of Venus and Mars as well that caused
all the catastrophes heaped upon our ancestors.
As you might guess, I disagree with Velikovsky. I’m not alone;
nearly every accredited scientist on the planet disagrees with him
as well. There’s good reason for this: Velikovsky was wrong.
Really, really wrong. The astronomical events he describes are not
so much impossible as they are fantastically impossible—literally,
they are fantasy.
To be fair, a lot of accepted scientific theories sound fantastic,
too. Who can believe that the universe started as a tiny pinpoint
that exploded, creating time and space, which then began to expand,
forming the cosmos as we see it now?
What you have to remember is that the Big Bang was first proposed
after many astronomical observations were made that could
not be explained any other way. There has been a great deal of
support for the Big Bang for decades now, and it’s actually one of
the most solid ideas in science. On the other hand, Velikovsky’s
ideas have little support from astronomical observations, and in
fact many fairly well-established astronomical theories directly
contradict his ideas. The difference between the Big Bang and Velikovsky’s
thesis is physical evidence. The former has lots, the latter
has none.