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

186 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
dust next to ones about UFO aliens curing pimples using homeopathic
crystals. Instead, even after half a century, it can be found
on bookshelves today.
PPP
There’s an ironic footnote to this episode in the history of science.
Certainly, scientists of the day dismissed Velikovsky because his
assertions clearly flew in the face of everything known about physics
and astronomy, then and still today. They also ridiculed him because,
at the time, it was thought that the planets were fairly static.
Things didn’t change much. Any change that occurred was gradual,
slow, glacial. Nothing happened suddenly. This type of thinking
is called uniformitarianism.
However, this tide was turning. As observations of the planets
improved, including our own, we started to learn that things didn’t
always happen at a stately rate. The Moon is covered with craters;
it was once thought that these were volcanic, but around the same
time as Worlds in Collision was published, scientists were starting
to speculate that at least some lunar craters were formed from
meteor impacts. Venus’ surface bears evidence that some massive
event resurfaced the whole planet some hundreds of millions of
years ago, and it looks like there have been many mass extinctions
caused by individual catastrophic events here on Earth.
Today we understand that both uniformitarianism and catastrophism
describe the history of our solar system. Things mostly
go along slowly, then are suddenly punctuated by rapid events.
Velikovsky supporters claim that he was simply ahead of his
time, and his theories of catastrophism were denied their due. This
is silly; just because he used the idea that catastrophes happened
doesn’t mean that any of the things he described were right. But it
is rather funny that scientists of the day were wrong in many of
their assertions of uniformitarianism as well.
Still, that’s the difference between science and pseudoscience:
scientists learn from their mistakes and abandon theories that don’t
pan out. Velikovsky was wrong, as were the scientists at the time.
But science—real science—has moved on. Maybe we can all learn
something from this.