Dan Bolser wrote:
On 17/09/2007, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/17/07, Ian Tresman ian2@knowledge.co.uk wrote:
The credibility of Velikovsky's ideas have nothing to do with the Pensée series. And Velikovsky never described planetary "billiards".
My grandparents' library had some of his first editions. I'm using one of the modern euphamisms, but I'm intimately familiar with his work. It has no scientific credibility in the modern sense.
I guess we are going way off topic here, but didn't Velikovsky lay the seeds of what eventually became the asteroid theory of the extinction of the dinosaurs? A couple of decades back it was all ... could it have been disease? could it have been global warming?... now many scientists think that an asteroid strike is the most likely scenario.
This kind of presaging is not an unusual phenomenon. Some people had great insights, but the means of testing their hypotheses did not exist yet for them. That made it too easy for the ideas to be misapplied.
Although Velikovskys ideas seem crazy with hindsight...
But that's true enough.
Ec