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

WORLDS IN DERISION 185
or mainstream science? In my opinion, neither. I’d say they both
lost. Velikovsky made several rambling speeches that neither supported
nor detracted from his cause, and his supporters came
across more as religious zealots than anything else. On the side of
science, there was much posturing and posing. Sagan—for whom I
have tremendous respect both as a scientist and as someone who
popularized teaching astronomy to the public—did a terrible job
debunking Velikovsky’s ideas. He made straw-man arguments, and
attacked only small details of Velikovsky’s claims.
The book Scientists Confront Velikovsky [Cornell University
Press, 1977] transcribes the talks given by scientists at the meeting.
As it happens, Velikovsky’s talk is not in the book. Sagan was given
an extra 50 percent more space to rebut Velikovsky’s arguments
using arguments not in Sagan’s original paper, but Velikovsky was
not given any room to counter Sagan’s rebuttals. Because of this
word-length dispute, Velikovsky withdrew his paper from the book.
In the book, Sagan gives his arguments against Velikovsky and expands
upon them even further in his own (otherwise excellent) book,
Broca’s Brain. Again, Sagan’s arguments are not all that great. For
example, he gives the energy criteria necessary for Jupiter to eject
Venus but then ignores Jupiter’s own rotation, which is crucial for
the analysis. On his web site about the affair, fellow scientist and
author Jerry Pournelle calls Sagan’s performance “shameful.”
Sagan’s and Shapley’s reactions were not uncommon in any way
among scientists. Many of them loathed the very idea of Velikovsky
writing this book and the fact that he was getting rich from
it too. But the extreme amount of bile and bitterness only helped
make Velikovsky a martyr. To this day he is practically revered by
his followers.
Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “I know no safe depositary [sic]
of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves;
and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control
with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from
them, but to inform their discretion by education.” Perhaps, if
Shapley and his fellow scientists had heeded Jefferson, Worlds in
Collision would be just another silly pseudoscientific book collecting