Kicking the Sacred Cow

by James P. Hogan

  Originally the deal had been for equal time for both sides of the panel. This was now reinterpreted to mean equal time for each speaker. So, for every half hour that Velikovsky was given, every one of his opponents would receive a half hour too. The flagrant bias was hardly allayed by a statement from King to Pensée stating that "What disturbs the scientists is persistence of these views, in spite of all the efforts the scientists have spent on educating the public" and "This is not a debate on the correctness of Velikovsky's view of the planetary system; none of us in the scientific community believes that such a debate would be remotely justified at a serious scientific meeting." 118

  So much for the promised impartiality. It apparently followed that the considerable number of specialists who evidently did believe that such a debate would be justified were by definition not among "us" of the scientific community.

  Velikovsky's hope that the flood of evidence and rekindled interest in his ideas might finally have won him a fair hearing had clearly been misplaced. Many of his supporters advised him to pull out right there rather than accept a pitch that had already been tilted seismically against him. The bind, of course, was that this would immediately have been seized upon as showing that he had no answers. Lynn Rose has since speculated that Velikovsky knew exactly what he was doing, and accepted the inevitability of short-term defeat, given the climate of the times, in return for an even stronger verdict in his favor that history would one day pronounce.

  So it came about that on February 25, 1974, in the Grand Ballroom of the St. Francis Hotel, Velikovsky, then in his seventy-ninth year, watched by a press corps that had been appropriately primed and apparently saw nothing amiss with the arrangements, mounted the dais to take on four hostile opponents all around half his age in an ordeal that would last until 1:00 a.m. and continue the following day. The final low trick was that the only paper he was permitted to see in advance was Storer's, which didn't deal with Velikovsky's scientific issues. The others were withheld until the day itself, forcing Velikovsky to muster what defense he could in the time he could find—a practice that would be illegal in any law court not rigged by a totalitarian state. At the end of the first session, which went on for five and a half hours, one reporter, seeing that Velikovsky looked tired, remarked that he was not his own best spokesman. Not one of the press representatives mentioned that at the end of it all, he had acquitted himself well enough to receive a standing ovation.

  Echoing the tone of his memorandum to Pensée, King's opening statement included the words, "No one who is involved in the organization of this symposium believes that Dr. Velikovsky's ideas are correct. Yet millions of people have read his books and after more than twenty years of condemnation by the scientific establishment he still has a large and often devoted following. . . . It is in this spirit that we present this morning's symposium." In other words, this isn't to debate a scientific theory. The purpose is to investigate the persistence of views that we know are wrong. We're here to stamp out heresy.

  The first speaker was Storer, who talked about the norms of science and the ideals of method and behavior that it seeks to live up to. Acknowledging that the scientific community had violated these standards in its treatment of Velikovsky back in the fifties, he reminded the audience that this had been a period when science and indeed the whole intellectual enterprise was under attack. The Cold War had been at its chilliest, with loyalty oaths being demanded, blacklists drawn up, and Senator Joseph McCarthy waiting to pounce at the first hint of deviancy or Communist connection. Simply being a scientist was to be a potential traitor, and it was perhaps understandable that they had reacted defensively and failed to welcome with open arms another apparent attempt to discredit established scientific knowledge—and in particular by an outsider.

  If that were the case, then we would expect a different reception to be accorded to insiders presenting revolutionary ideas at times of lesser political tension, not gripped by corresponding extremes of paranoia. But as we already saw in the case of Halton Arp and the cosmologists, and will meet again when we look at Peter Duesberg's reception by the AIDS establishment, it turns out not to be so. One could as well argue that the political stresses of the Reformation excused the Catholic Church's suppression of Galileo and others. In all cases the real crime was the challenging of established authority.

  Only the Data That's Fit to Print: The Venus Tablets

  Peter Huber's profession and hobby were inverted both in the official program, which described him as a "professor of ancient history" speaking on "ancient historical records," and King's introduction as one who "has made a study of the ancient archaeological records relating to astronomy. He also, incidentally, has a second specialty in statistics . . ." 119

  The essence of Huber's paper was that ancient Babylonian records show Venus to have been where it is today, orbiting as it does today, long before the events that Velikovsky claims, and therefore those events could not have happened. This was a rehash of the same line that Payne-Gaposchkin had used twenty years before, and which Velikovsky had answered. The opposition either hadn't read the earlier exchanges or didn't care, since it would all be new anyway to the public who were to be "educated."

  Huber maintained that "Velikovsky draws on historical and archeological evidence to support his hypothesis, but unfortunately his arguments are mainly based on late and secondary sources, in part on obsolete and erroneous translations, and therefore lack force." A devastating indictment, by the sound of it, from one listed and presented as an authority on the subject. It is acknowledged that discrepancies exist between old translations and modern ones, and then asserted that the modern ones contain the truth, whereas the older ones do not. A better way to phrase it, however, would be that the older ones say what the original records said, whereas the modern ones are "corrected" to reflect what proponents of today's approved theory think they should have said. This couldn't have been better demonstrated than by the procedure that Huber himself followed. It would have been far more "unfortunate" for Huber if Lynn Rose, who was in the audience, had been allowed on the panel as Velikovsky requested. Rose made some pointed observations during the questions session afterward, and later, working with Raymond C. Vaughan, wrote a detailed rebuttal showing just how far the evidence has to be twisted to make it conform to current preconceptions. The title, "Just Plainly Wrong," speaks for itself. 120

  Huber's first claim boiled down to stating that records from Uruk, in Mesopotamia, show Venus to have existed in the early third millennium b.c., before Velikovsky's Venus encounter occurred. But Velikovsky had never denied that Venus existed before then and was visible. His answer at the symposium was, "That Venus was observed before it came into conflict with Earth is clear from what I wrote. It did not come from Jupiter just on the eve of that collision. It came thousands of years before. It could be seen." And what Velikovsky had said all along could have been seen since 1950.

  From the floor, Lynn Rose made the point that the symbols for Venus in these very sources that Huber cited, along with representations of Inanna, the goddess associated with Venus, all take the form of a compact body attached to a long, spreading and sometimes curving fan shape, distinctly suggestive of a comet. Huber's defense amounted to saying that sometimes they don't. This part of his paper was omitted from the version that appeared in the final book form of the proceedings two and a half years later, entitled, aptly enough, Scientists Confront Velikovsky (1977). 121

  Huber's second claim drew upon the Ammizaduga tablets, mentioned earlier, which were introduced with something of an air of revelation, as if Velikovsky had avoided them because they would damage his case. In fact, Velikovsky cites them extensively for doing just the opposite—provided they're allowed to be taken as meaning what they say.

  Since some doubts have been expressed about their conventional assignment to the time of Ammizaduga, Rose refers to them as the "Ninsianna" (Venus) document. They record the appearances and disappearances of Venus as it moves close
to the Sun and it is swamped by the solar glare, causing it to be seen first at sunset to one side of the solar disk, and then, following a period of invisibility, at dawn on the other. Today, on its inner orbit, Venus is seen for about 260 days as the "Evening Star," disappears behind the Sun for 63 to 70 days, reappears on the other side as the "Morning Star" for about another 260 days, and after vanishing in front of the Sun for around 8 days becomes the Evening Star again. (It took many ancient cultures some time to figure out that it was the same object.) Note that there's no conflict in the suggestion of a comet on an eccentric orbit spending part of its period inside the Earth's orbit, and hence disappearing periodically behind the Sun. During the time it spent outside the Earth's orbit it would at times appear overhead at night, which could never happen with Venus in today's circumstances. Older translations, however (the ones dismissed as obsolete by Huber), clearly state it as appearing at zenith.

  Huber's contention was that when properly understood, the ancient observations match the orbits of Venus and Earth that are seen today, and so the orbits haven't changed. To make this work, a period given in the cuneiform records as 5 months, 16 days had to be changed to 2 months, 6 days. Several of the names of the months had to be changed. Places where the texts read "west" had to be changed to "east," and places where they said "east" were changed to "west." Intercalary months—inserted between the regular months of a calendar to correct the cumulative error that builds up from years not being exact multiples of days—were taken out from where they had been put in and inserted where the modern translators thought they should go. Huber justified such alterations as being necessary to amend "scribal errors" in the originals. All in all, under further questioning, he admitted changing thirty percent of his data in this way. So presumably a culture that is noted for astronomical records whose accuracy in some areas was not rivaled until the nineteenth century employed scribes who couldn't tell east from west, didn't know what month it was, and who bungled their figures thirty percent of the time. But that wasn't the end of it. In his later, more thorough analysis, "Just Plainly Wrong," Rose found the actual count of errors and fudged data to be closer to seventy-five percent. And even after that amount of abuse, they still don't fit today's orbits.

  The press and the custodians of truth who had taken it upon themselves to educate the public were evidently satisfied that the interests of the public were in good hands. The following month, Owen Gingerich, one of the organizers, was quoted in Science (March 14, 1974), in an interview by Robert Gillette, as saying that "He [Huber] demolished Velikovsky" and "There was no point in continuing after that." As with the Egyptian dating figures that we talked about earlier, whatever didn't fit the assumptions was thrown out, and what remained was pointed to as proving the assumptions. The logic is totally circular. Or anything else if you like. On this basis you could pick four points from a circle, alter the rest to suit, and show that it's a square. Small wonder that modern translations fit the approved theory better.

  A final argument by Huber was again one that had been used before, namely that dates of eclipses retrocalculated from modern observations match records from before the events that should have made them invalid. Velikovsky responded that none of the instances he was aware of proved much at all, since the locations and dates are not specified, the year alone typically being named or inferred indirectly. One of Huber's examples, taken from the Chinese Spring and Autumn Annals, was given as occurring in the eighth century b.c. In his later study, however, Rose points out that the furthest back this document can be traced is 500 to 600 years after that time. So the question arises of whether the eclipse was actually observed, or was it inferred through retrocalculation by the compilers of the Annals a half a millennium later?—known to be a not-unusual practice. In support of his cautioning against relying too much on such sources, Rose cites a work entitled Science Awakening II: The Birth of Astronomy, by Bartel L. Van der Waerden, where Chapter 4 contains the statement, "Very often it is difficult to decide whether text data were observed or calculated. We know from the diaries of later times that missing observations were filled in by calculation sometimes without explicit indication of the fact." 122

  A contributor to the book, who in his Preface Van der Waerden says wrote considerable parts of Chapters 3 and 4—was Peter Huber.

  Pronouncements from the Celestial Heights

  Derral Mullholland was introduced by King as "a celestial mechanician whose name is almost synonymous with high precision." The open snub to Velikovsky, whose ideas, the gathering had shortly before been informed, "No one who is involved in the organization of this symposium believes . . . are correct," was difficult to miss; as were the implied directions to those interpreting the event for the public as to how they should apportion their impartial evaluation.

  Mulholland opened: "Before I am asked the question, I would like to point out that I first read Dr. Velikovsky's work in Collier's magazine, when I was sixteen years old, and have read that same work three times since, the most recent yet this year. I found it entertaining when I was sixteen, incidentally, and I still do." 123 The celestial mechanician whose name was almost synonymous with high precision, having given his source as a popular magazine, then began with a synopsis of Velikovsky's planetary theory that read: "Within the folk memory of man, Venus and Mars erupted into the sky and rushed close to the Earth and each other several times. . . . Finally, the two giant comets settle down into their present harmless orbits and became peaceable planets."

  Whether he had in mind this invented scenario or the one that Velikovsky actually described, Mulholland repeated the usual insistence that gravitational dynamics provides the most clear-cut contradiction to its being possible. Well, without repeating all that was said earlier, suffice it to say that Einstein didn't think so. The critique then went on to question the validity of accounts of abnormally long days and nights from various parts of the world, when the durations given by people said to possess clocks of high accuracy varied from three to ten days. The lowest form of wit notwithstanding, it's difficult to restrain an impulse toward sarcasm at a suggestion that people in terror, beset by earthquakes, hurricanes, totally enveloping darkness, and torrents of meteorites should be faulted for losing track of time and failing to check with their sundials and water clocks. Mulholland also stated that the myths Velikovsky quotes "do not seem to satisfy the simple requirement" that abnormally long day in one hemisphere ought to be accompanied by abnormally long night in the other. Perhaps the myths Velikovsky quotes that do say precisely this were not among the excerpts condensed in Collier's.

  In Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky discusses various ancient sundials and water clocks that read incorrectly for the locations that they are found at, and offers this as evidence of changes in the Earth's motion in space. Mulholland's rejoinder was to doubt the accuracy of such old artifacts and question whether they were constructed at the sites where they are found. No independent evidence is cited of such inaccuracies, or that any relocation of the instruments in question actually took place. The assumptions are made ad hoc, to conform to a preconceived theory that the lengths of days, months, and years must have been the same as they are today. Therefore ancient peoples were unable to measure the time of day. In fact, Babylonian water clocks were accurate enough to be used for astronomical observations and measuring the distances between stars in arc degrees. 124 Moving sundials to another location would make no sense, as anyone capable of designing them would know. A water clock would function correctly at a different latitude if it told only constant hours, but not if it measured different hours in summer and winter. Some water clocks divided day into twelve hours and night into twelve hours, which vary with latitude and with the seasons. Again, it's difficult to imagine designers who were aware of these differences not having the competence to set them up correctly.

  The other objection was that according to Velikovsky's account of the errors involved, if they were due to repositioning of the Earth, Babylon woul
d seem to have moved southward 250 kilometers, Faijum in Egypt also southward but by an unspecified amount, while Thebes moved 1,000 kilometers north. The assumption here is that they all moved during the same time period, while Velikovsky says nothing of the kind. Indeed, historians assign the shadow clock at Faijum that Velikovsky refers to, and the water clock at Thebes, to two widely spaced dynasties. 125

  In any case, Mulholland maintained, if the spins and orbits of the bodies Velikovsky talks about were seriously disturbed, they would depart from the smooth progression showing angular momentum as a function of mass across the bodies of the Solar System. But he admitted that Mercury, Venus, the Moon, and Mars didn't fit the relationship. Ransom and Rose later showed that the function line misses Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Neptune, and the Sun. Too bad they weren't up on the panel.

  It would not be out of place to mention here that the pictures of Mars returned by Mariners 6 and 7 in 1969 had shown a system of surface cracks ("lineaments") running more or less straight over extended distances and aligned with the rotational axis, indicating a violent deceleration and change in angular momentum at some time, stressing the crust. Comparable structures are seen also on the Moon and on Earth.

  During the question session after Storer's talk earlier, Mulholland had given anomalous mass concentrations on the Moon and the unexpected internal heat of the Moon as examples of scientists' readiness to accept new concepts when they were justified. Velikovsky asked if he knew who had been the first person to claim that the Moon would be found to have internal heat, and if there was any explanation for the mass concentrations other than an encounter with other celestial bodies. Mulholland had no suggestion regarding the second, and admitted that he didn't know the answer to the first, apparently not realizing that the person had been Velikovsky himself.