At 12:21 19/09/2007, you wrote:
On 18/09/2007, George Herbert
<george.herbert(a)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