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

184 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
This question is more philosophical than practical. However,
part of the answer lies in the way the scientific community treated
Velikovsky when he published his book.
Initially, in 1950, when the Macmillan publishing house was
preparing the manuscript for publication, the scientific community
caught a whiff of it. In particular, a Harvard astronomer named
Harlow Shapley wrote several vitriolic letters to the editors at
Macmillan saying—correctly, mind you—that Velikovsky’s ideas
were wrong, and that Macmillan was doing everyone a big disservice
by publishing them. At the time Macmillan was a very
large publisher of scientific textbooks, and Shapley said that the
publisher’s reputation would be damaged by selling Worlds in Collision.
From what I have read, there were intimations, although
not direct threats, that Shapley would use his considerable reputation
to pressure other scientists to boycott Macmillan’s books.
This was a serious problem for the publisher. When Velikovsky’s
book came out it rocketed onto the bestseller list, no doubt aided
by the controversy. It was a huge money maker. Macmillan, however,
also made a lot of money from textbooks. In one of the worst
publishing decisions ever, bowing to the pressure, they transferred
the rights to Worlds in Collision and its sequels to Doubleday, which
suddenly found themselves printing a book they couldn’t keep on
the shelves. This only added to the book’s mystique, aiding its sales.
With sales booming, the scientific pressure against Velikovsky
continued. His book became a favorite among college students,
especially in the 1960s when intellectual rebellion was fashionable.
The situation became so bad, as far as “establishment” scientists
went, that the American Association for the Advancement of Science
sponsored a semipublic debate in 1974 between Velikovsky
and his detractors in an attempt to discredit the book once and for
all. One of the leading scientists in the debate was Carl Sagan, who
by then was something of a media darling, a professional skeptic,
and well-known by the general public.
I did not attend this debate, as I was only nine years old at the
time. However, I have read many accounts of this infamous meeting
on the web and in books. Which side won, Velikovsky’s rebels