Irving Michelson's talk was in the evening session and went back to the notion of electrical forces playing a role in celestial dynamics. Mulholland rejected the suggestion that they played any role, and when Velikovsky cited Danjon's report of a temporary slowing of the Earth's rotation by electrical influences following a large solar flare, Mulholland denied that Danjon's data had shown any such effect.
Toward the end of his paper, Michelson mentioned a "curious but tantalizing" finding of his: that the energy required to turn the Earth's rotational axis through 180º corresponded closely to estimates of a single moderately strong geomagnetic storm that could be triggered by a solar flare—in the way the energy of a bomb is triggered by the small energy release of a detonator. Evidently missing the point, Mulholland scoffed at the idea, pointing out that since 108 times as much energy is emitted by a solar flare as is intercepted by the Earth, Michelson's result was in error by that amount. When Michelson responded wearily, "I'll let that go," his remark was widely misinterpreted as meaning that he had no answer. A stormy exchange of correspondence resulted subsequently with the editorial department of Science, who tried to suppress a letter from Michelson straightening out the error.
Dr. Robert Bass, who had been a keen observer of the whole affair for some years, wrote a concise reply to a number of the points that Mulholland had raised in the day and requested time to present them at the same evening session, which was supposedly open to all. He was told that this wouldn't be allowed since the public might become confused if a noted authority disagreed with the expert chosen by the committee.
Well, at least we can be comforted that the organizers hadn't forgotten their commitment to education.
Carl Sagan: The Star Billing
And then there was Dr. Carl Sagan. . . . How to begin here?
Professor Lynn Rose records that in January 1974, when arrangements for the symposium were being finalized, he commented in a letter to Stephen Talbott at Pensée that Sagan delivered errors and untruths at a rate faster than it would be possible to list in the time Velikovsky was being given, let alone be able to refute them. In a tape of a lecture by Sagan at Cornell in March 1973 entitled "Venus and Velikovsky," Rose timed them at three or four per minute, giving a grand total of several score. His review of them appeared some years later in the journal The Velikovskian, edited by Charles Ginenthal. 126
Sagan's perspective on the subject can perhaps be judged from his statement in Broca's Brain, published five years after the symposium: "Catastrophism began largely in the minds of those geologists who accepted a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis, and in particular, the account of the Noahic flood." 127 Even after the time that had been given to reflect, as far as Sagan was concerned all questioning of accepted theory originated in the minds of the—implicitly—deluded, to justify religious convictions. No possibility exists that it could have originated in the form of real events in the real universe before anything at all was written. On page 126 he goes on, "Velikovsky attempts to rescue not only religion but also astrology."
Hence, the question of a scientific debate never arose. The presumption of fighting an evangelical crusade was written into the ground rules from the beginning, and when saving souls from heresy is at stake, winning is the only thing that counts, at whatever cost and by any means. Robert Anton Wilson writes:
"Sagan likes to quote a 'distinguished professor of Semitics' who told him no Semitic scholars take Dr. Velikovsky very seriously. . . . [T]his 'distinguished professor' remains anonymous, and thus Sagan's hearsay about him would get thrown out of any civilized court. Three distinguished professors of Semitic studies, however, have all shown cordial support for Dr. Velikovsky: Prof. Claude F. A. Schaeffer, Prof. Etienne Droiton, and Prof. Robert Pfeiffer. Look them up in any Who's Who of Semitic studies, archeology and Egyptology. They have a lot more prestige in those fields than Sagan's Prof. Anonymous, who doesn't have a single entry under his name anywhere . . ." 128
At the San Francisco symposium, Sagan presented ten problems, which he referred to as "plagues," with Velikovsky's proposals. Ginenthal's book (1995) that I cited near the beginning is a compilation and rebuttal of the errors, evasions, denials of evidence, and self-contradictions that took the author eight years of research and occupies 447 pages. I will touch on all of them, elaborating on just a few.
Sagan on Astronomy
Problem 1. The Ejection of Venus by Jupiter
Sagan stated that "Velikovsky's hypothesis begins with an event that has never been observed by astronomers and that is inconsistent with much that we know about planetary and cometary physics, namely the ejection of an object of planetary dimensions from Jupiter."
One wonders who, exactly, the "we" in the authoritarian "we know" is, since the literature makes it clear that the scientific community didn't pretend to know, and nothing much in that respect has changed since. As related above, grave doubts had been cast on the fashionable tidal and accretion theories of Solar System formation, and such figures as McCrea and Lyttleton couldn't have been among the "we" who "knew," since the fission theory that their work (among others) pointed to emerged as an alternative that was consistent with planetary physics. And the reason for their conclusions? Gravitational theory—precisely what Velikovsky was accused of not understanding or ignoring. But he was fully conversant with Lyttleton's work, which he had cited in "Venus—A Youthful Planet" seven years previously. Sagan also produced figures for energy and heat generation showing that a volcanic eruption on Jupiter couldn't have ejected an object resembling Venus, which was all neither here nor there because Velikovsky never said that a volcanic eruption had.
Sagan went on: "From the fact that the apehelia (greatest distances from the Sun) of the orbits of short-period comets have a statistical tendency to lie near Jupiter, Laplace and other early astronomers hypothesized that Jupiter was the source of such comets. This is an unnecessary hypothesis because we now know [again] that long-period comets may be transferred to short-period trajectories by the perturbations of Jupiter."
Later in the same year that Sagan said this, the International Astronomical Union held its twenty-fifth colloquium at Greenbelt, Maryland. In the Proceedings, a paper by Edgar Everhart entitled "The Evolution of Cometary Orbits" states that: "Although it is possible for an orbit of short-period to be the result after a parabolic comet makes a single close encounter with Jupiter, this mechanism does not explain the existence of the short-period comets. This was shown by H. A. Newton (1893). Not wanting to believe his results, and being a little dubious about Newton's procedures, I redid the problem as a numerical experiment and came to exactly the same conclusion." [Emphasis in the original] 129
So ever since 1893 there had been people who not only didn't "know," but found such a transfer model unsupported by the evidence. The main problem is that it would only happen very rarely that a comet entering the Solar System would pass close enough to Jupiter to be pulled into an elliptical orbit that returns it periodically to near Jupiter's distance from the Sun. S. K. Vsekhsviatsky estimates 1 in 100,000, whereas the observed ratio is about 1 in 25. About 70 comets are known in the Jupiter family, and their lifetime is estimated to be not more than 4,000 years before repeated passes by the Sun evaporate all their volatiles and cause them to break up. Capturing this number from parabolic comets entering from afar would require seven million comets entering the Solar System over the last 4,000 years, which works out at five per day. Since a comet would remain in the System for a few years, the night sky should contain somewhere around 9,000 of them. It doesn't. A further difficulty is that all the Jovian comets orbit the Sun in the same direction, but since incoming trajectories should show no preference, according to the capture model about half should be retrograde. As a final embarrassment, the perturbation of comets by planets can work to eject them from the Solar System too, and this in fact turns out to be a more likely and effective mechanism, resulting in the number of short-period comets as a whole being in the
order of one hundred times too large.
On the other hand, all of these observations are consistent with the suggestion of many such objects being created recently inside the Solar System. (Accounts from the Roman period indicate significantly more comets occurring then than are seen today.) And no elaborate and implausible construction is needed to explain why they should appear to have originated from the vicinity of Jupiter, for the simple reason that they did.
The conventional way of preserving the short-term-capture principle is the "Oort Cloud," postulated to contain millions of cometary bodies and extend halfway to the nearest stars, which once in a while is disturbed by a passing star to send showers of comets into the Solar System. However, studies of the distribution of comet trajectories and energies show the long-term comets to be quite distinct from shorter-period ones. Arrivals from such a remote source should exhibit preponderantly hyperbolic orbits incapable of being converted to short-term ones. To explain the short-term comets, a new cloud termed the "Kuiper Belt" is then proposed, existing in deep space near the planetary plane. Finally, a belt of "dark matter," the invisible astronomical duct tape that fixes anything, is introduced to induce the Kuiper Belt comets to approach the Solar System. None of this has ever been "observed by astronomers" either. It's invented to enable what the theory requires.
Plenty of people, on the other hand, did claim to have observed the event that Sagan denies, and they left precise descriptions of it. But since Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, Maya, and the like aren't figured among the exalted "we," they don't count as astronomers.
Problem 2. Repeated Collisions Among the Earth, Venus, And Mars
Sagan produces a mathematical proof that the probability of five or six near collisions occurring between a comet and a planet are in the order of a "trillion quadrillion" (1027) to one against. The trouble with it is that it treats each near-collision as an independent event unrelated to the others, which in effect ignores gravity. It's a simple consequence of Newton's laws that two celestial bodies, once they have interacted gravitationally, will continue to approach one another periodically. The astronomer Robert Bass wrote that this was "so disingenuous that I do not hesitate to label it a deliberate fraud on the public or else a manifestation of unbelievable incompetence or hastiness combined with desperation." 130 On the other hand, Sagan has no hesitation in accepting that "most short-period comets may have achieved their orbits by multiple encounters with Jupiter, or even by multiple encounters with more distant planets and eventually Jupiter itself"—a process calculated to require hundreds of repeated near-collisions.
In his own book Comet (1985) Sagan states (p. 266) that a collision with an Earth-crossing asteroid kilometers across, which he believes to be extinct comets, would represent "a major catastrophe, of a sort that must have happened from time to time during the history of the Earth. It is a statistical inevitability." Enough said.
Problem 3. The Earth's Rotation
Sagan's question here is how, if the Earth slowed down in its rotation, could it get speeded up again? The Earth couldn't do it by itself, he insisted, because of the law of conservation of angular momentum. In 1960, as we've already seen, Danjon measured precisely this happening and attributed it to electrical effects. Conceivably Sagan, like Mulholland, simply refused to believe it. But in 1972 it had happened again, this time even more impressively. On August 7–8, after a week of frenzied solar activity, Stephen Plagemann and John Gribbin measured a 10-millisecond lengthening of the day, once more followed by a gradual return to normal. 131
This is in accord with electrical fundamentals, whereby adding charge to a rotating flywheel constitutes a current that increases the polar moment of inertia, which by the conservation of angular momentum must be accompanied by a decrease in angular velocity, i.e., the flywheel slows down. When the wheel is grounded, dissipating the charge, then by the same principle of conservation—the very law that Sagan invokes—the wheel, still storing the same mechanical energy but with no electrical force to overcome, will speed up again. The application of this to planetary dynamics is discussed by Ralph Juergens. 132
Sagan goes on to another mathematical proof, this time showing that the energy released by the Earth's stopping would be enough to boil all the oceans and generate enough heat to end all advanced life forms. But once again, it isn't necessary for the Earth to halt to produce the visual effect of the Sun's motion being arrested or even reversed. Ginenthal points out that with proto-Venus approaching from the sunward direction, the Earth would be pulled first inward and then outward from its normal orbit, the differences in distance being sufficient on their own to make the Sun appear to move more slowly, without appreciable change in the Earth's rotation at all. He refers anyone skeptical of such a possibility to the well-known astronomer Carl Sagan, who later wrote:
"There is another strange thing about Mercury. It has a highly elliptical orbit. That is, there is a commensurate relation between how long the planet takes to turn once around its axis and how long it takes to go around the Sun. . . . Suppose you stood at one particular place on the equator of Mercury. During the course of the day there you would observe the following. You would see it rising . . . moving toward the zenith . . . Then one degree past the zenith it stops, reverses its motion in the sky, stops again, then continues its original motion. . . ." 133
That was in 1975. I can only wonder what might have prompted the inspiration.
Sagan on Terrestrial and Lunar Geology
Problem 4. Terrestrial Geology And Lunar Craters
Sagan repeats the assertion that there ought to be ample geological and archeological evidence of such catastrophes if they happened, but he was unable to find records of any. One can only suggest visiting the library on that one—as Velikovsky did, and found enough to fill a whole book.
Sagan was aware of Velikovsky's contention that major mountain uplifts had attended these recent events, but stated that this was belied by geological evidence that put them at tens of millions of years old or more. It's true that the evidence Sagan cites is generally interpreted that way. But we've already seen how sufficient prior belief in a theory can influence interpretation of the evidence by uncritically accepting whatever conforms to it and rejecting anything that doesn't. Much of Velikovsky's evidence was of a kind that doesn't lend itself to a wide range of interpretation—for example, of human presence in the Alps and Andes at heights that are uninhabitable today. It's difficult to read this in any other way than that within the time of human history the land was a lot lower, or else the climate at high altitudes was a lot milder. The second alternative has trouble on other counts, for instance that in the historical period usually assigned to these cultures, glacial cover was more extensive.
But once a theory is "known" to be true, the determination of the believers in making the evidence fit knows no bounds. Ginenthal cites an example where investigators of Lake Titicaca in Peru and the ancient fortress city of Tiahuanacu on its shores, thirteen thousand feet above sea level, faced with clear indications that the region must have been at sea level during the times of human habitation, were driven to conclude that the remains of the cities must be millions of years old since the uplift couldn't be anything less.
With regard to Velikovsky's claim that the Moon should show signs of recent disturbances and melting, Sagan responds that the samples returned by the Apollo missions show no melting of rock more than a few hundred million years ago. We've already seen some examples of how strong expectations of what the results ought to be can lead to circular reasoning in dating procedures. And lunar dating is no exception. When it was believed early on that lunar rocks would provide a direct measure of the age of the Moon and hence the Earth, the results subsequently released with confidence and which found their way into textbooks cited 4.5 billion years, which agreed exactly with the predictions of the most widely accepted theory. Later, the actual data were found to cover the range 2 billion years to 28 billion, in other words from less than half of
what was expected to 8 billion years before the universe was supposed to have existed.
But aside from that, Velikovsky had suggested in a letter to the New York Times in 1971 that tests be performed on lunar material by the dating method of thermoluminescence, which many authorities consider to be more reliable than radioisotope testing. NASA did in fact have such tests performed, at the Washington University, St. Louis. The results on samples from six inches or so beneath the surface—below recently deposited dust and mixing of micrometeorites—showed them to have been molten less than ten thousand years ago. Sagan should surely have been aware of this. It's also worthy of mention that the darker "maria" features of the lunar surface, which consist of vast solidified lava sheets, occur not haphazardly but cover a broad swathe following a great circle across one hemisphere—consistent with tidal melting induced by a close-passing massive object.
And speaking of the great lunar plains, what happened to all the dust that ought to be covering them? According to estimates of the rate of infalling meteorite dust and other debris on Earth—including some made by Sagan himself—if the lunar surface has been exposed for over four billion years, it ought to have accumulated dust to a depth of more than fifty feet. An early concern of the space program had been that the landers would sink into the dust or become too bogged down in it to take off again. But all that was found was about an eighth of an inch. On the other hand, such features as rills, rifts, and crater walls that should, by those same figures, have been eroded away and disappeared long ago seemed sharp and fresh—dare one say "young"? The features that should have been gone were still there, while the dust that should have worn them down and buried them was not. And even of the dust that does exist, only 1 to 2 percent turns out to be meteoritic. The rest comes from "gardening" (after remelting?) of the moon rock itself.
Kicking the Sacred Cow Page 23
