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...