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

WORLDS IN DERISION 179
do now for the past billion or two years at least. If there have been
any disturbances, they certainly have not occurred in the past few
millennia.
Velikovsky spends quite some time in Worlds in Collision trying
to show that Venus was ejected by Jupiter. He is wrong; such
an event simply could not happen. It can be shown mathematically
that the amount of energy needed to eject Venus would have literally
vaporized the planet! In other words, whatever type of event
Velikovsky envisioned to shoot Venus out of Jupiter actually would
have turned Venus into a very hot, incandescent gas, exploding outwards
like, well, an explosion. It certainly would not have formed
a solid body able to roam the solar system. This seriously weakens
his argument about Venus wandering the solar system, unless you
believe in truly immense forces having incredibly benign effects.
It would be like dropping an anvil on an egg and winding up with
two perfectly split egg shells, one with the white inside and the other
with the yolk. When forces are that huge, they rarely clean up after
themselves so neatly. In reality, the egg would be a goopy mess, just
as Venus would be by whatever forces Velikovsky was imagining.
Still, let’s grant that some mysterious unknown force set Venus
in motion. So, ignoring the genesis of Venus, is it still possible that
it somehow passed so close to the Earth that it caused widespread
disaster here?
In a word: no.
From his readings Velikovsky concludes that Venus passed close
enough to the Earth to stop its rotation, moved off, then came back
a few hours later and started the Earth moving again. However, he
is very vague about the exact mechanism for this. He theorizes that
perhaps the Earth didn’t really slow and stop, but instead it flipped
over on its axis, making the north pole become the south pole and
vice versa.
Indeed, he spends dozens of pages giving evidence that the
Earth didn’t always spin with the north pole in the position it is
now. He starts a chapter about this as follows: “Our planet rotates
from west to east. Has it always done so?” He quotes ancient texts
as saying that the Earth has flipped not just once, but many times.
His basis for this is pretty shaky. One passage he quotes talks
about two drawings of constellations found in an Egyptian tomb.