At 12:21 19/09/2007, you wrote:
On 18/09/2007, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Yeah, unfortunately unless you know the history here (Sagan was monumentally unpopular in his field, as popular as he was to the public), it's easy to be confused.
And Sagan was particularly annoying even by his own standards in this set of arguments, I vaguely recall.
It's a single quote from a "mainstream" astronomer; given the circumstances surrounding the debate, I think we can safely assume it was someone calling Sagan a twerp rather than calling Velikovsky a respected scientist! The dangers of contextless quotation...
Yes, context is important. Jastrow noted: "Dr. Velikovsky had his day when he spotted a major scientific boner in Professor Sagan's argument" concerning the odds against the collisions in Worlds in Collision. The "error lay in the assumption that the collisions were independent of one another.... Dr. Velikovsky pointed out that the collisions are not independent; in fact, if two bodies orbiting the sun under the influence of gravity collided once, that encounter enhances the chance of another, a fact well known in celestial mechanics. Professor Sagan's calculations, in effect, ignore the law of gravity. Here Velikovsky was the better astronomer." Robert Jastrow, "Velikovsky, a Star-Crossed Theoretician of the Cosmos," The New York Times (December 2,1979), p. 22E.
We may speculate that Jastrow was knocking Sagan, but his quote notes specifically that Velikovsky was better on this point (which is not the same as suggestion he was a respected scientist).
Jastrow had also noted that Velikovsky was "a man of extraordinary talents" with "powers of scholarship and intellect", and his theory as "radical, exciting, and potentially fruitful", and acknowledges three correct predictions: "Venus is hot; Jupiter emits radio noise; and the moon's rocks are magnetic" (and then notes seven false predictions).
Regards,
Ian Tresman www.plasma-universe.com