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There are a few things that he was correct about but no mention in the article.
For example, he was right about the high surface temperature on Venus; though his explanation/mechanics may have been off.
The same is true for extraterrestrial causes for massive cataclysms that happened to the Earth; though, again his explanations/mechanics may have been off or wrong.
Look at what is now accepted as to what happened to the Earth during its first few billion years of existence. At the time Velikovsky wrote, most of these ideas either did not exist or were summarily scoffed at.
Look at how long it took the scientists & scientific community to accept that rocks fell from the sky. We now know these as "meteorites."
Then there's one of the major causes of the 'extinction' of the dinosaurs. How long did it take the community to accept that something that big could hit the Earth.
Then there's the now accepted way of how the Moon came into existence. For the longest time the scientific community believed that it was captured by Earth's gravity. Now, the same scientific community accepts that it was created from a collision between the Earth and a near Mars-size body.
Yet with all this that is now accepted, no one even gives passing recognition to Velikovsky for helping current scientists to think out of the box and, as new movie versions/remakes are said to be, "reimagine" what could've happened.
Scientist even now accept that most of the planets have moved/wandered about the solar system and eventually settled into their current orbits.
This was one of Velikovsky's explanations/mechanics !
Scoffed at then - - - accepted now.
As such, I think that somewhere in his article some credit should be given to him.
Comments/ideas. 2600:8800:784:8F00:C23F:D5FF:FEC4:D51D ( talk) 19:21, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
The lede on this article is about as far from a neutral POV as you'll find anywhere in WP. It actually looks to be an attempt to discourage people from actually scrutinizing the evidence I.V. collected from around the world.
Did Velikovsky surmise wildly when he interpreted the evidence? There were certainly plenty of examples of that when I read his books. But look at the evidence he collected. And we know a -lot- more about the solar system than was known back then.
The 'outrage' over his interpretations has clearly diverted many from scrutinizing the evidence. It certainly collided with the hidebound worlds of orthodoxy. To this day, anyone who actually reads through 1955's Earth In Upheaval (no details about it are available on WP; that's ... interesting) has got be astounded at the depth and scope of the evidence I.V. pulled together.
In the intervening 65 years, much of this evidence has been backed up by earth-orbiting imagers (raising even more questions!), and much of it remains unexplained. Anyone can go visit these places. Like the terraces going above the snow-line in the Andes, they're not made up. The Siberian islands buried in washed-up mammoth tusks are still waiting.
Since his day we've seen (to mention just three): the emergence of plate tectonics (proposed by Wegener a half-century earlier...and adopted 10 years after I.V.'s first book) --- the recognition that the Earth has been struck by thousands of impactors (we even have government programs to watch for asteroids now) --- and that hundreds of megafauna species went suddenly extinct 13ka.
14 years after EiU, in 1969 Hamlet's Mill was published, providing more evidence (and outrage) of the weaknesses in existing theories. At that we didn't even realize that many archeological sites were observatories! THAT article actually examines the book, rather than resorting to name-calling (even adding some positive reviews ... I thoroughly enjoyed it; it's full of learning about remarkable things!)
J Harlen Bretz got pilloried for his 'catastrophism'. In the end (he outlived his critics) he won the top prize in geology. Because he was right about the evidence. (They weren't so quick to apply the hot 'pseudoscience' brand in those days.)
Gathering and publishing evidence (overlooked and unexplained to this day) is not in itself pseudoscience! I think that easy shortcut is out-of-place in any encyclopedia, particularly when it's used before a balanced appraisal, that should leave such conclusions to the reader after she has been appraised of the facts.
But that requires actually knowing the facts first. It's not clear that our authors, so far, have bothered to know them.
The meat of the article is fine, but the witch-burning rhetoric is uncalled for; a reasoning appraisal would be much more useful to the reader. Consequently, I'm adding an NPOV objection to the top of the article. Twang ( talk) 02:37, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
anyone who actually reads through 1955's Earth In Upheaval (no details about it are available on WP; that's ... interesting) has got be astounded at the depth and scope of the evidence I.V. pulled together.That is bullshit. Maybe it is true for someone who does not understand a single one of the disciplines V tried to revolutionize. But:
I am new to editing Wikipedia, and I apologize if I did something wrong by adding the quotes from Albert Einstein's letters to Velikovsky to the criticism section. I don't think they would be more appropriate if added to the Velikovskyism section under the 'Reception' heading. Could someone please advise on how to proceed? I am wondering if I should start a new section called 'Mixed criticism', perhaps, or what to do to appropriately add this information to the Immanuel Velikovsky page so that it is not again deleted. It is important that we set the record straight that Einstein engaged with Velikovsky's ideas, and it would be more than an embarrassment to the academy if a Princeton historian's unbiased record of Velikovsky-Einstein correspondence is inadequate for use on Wikipedia (not to mention that Michael D. Gordin is also inappropriately cited at the end of the first paragraph of the entry, which gives the impression that he is in favor of calling Velikovsky a pseudo-scholar; he is clearly not in favor of this sort of terminology but maintains that 'pseudoscience' lacks content and is a "term of abuse" -- please see the first few pages of the introduction to Gordin's The Pseudoscience Wars). The scientific establishment is further undermined by the fact that our most respected scientist's views are suspiciously omitted from this entry, which is why I took the time and effort to carefully edit. Thank you in advance should anyone have a suggestion for how to include this relevant and important information regarding Velikovsky's reception.
Let's talk about [1] instead of edit-warring.
@ User:David Highfield: Please read WP:BRD. Do not revert a revert.
The content is true, Velikovsky's ideas are indeed not very original. The format of the external link is wrong, and the site linked is not a reliable source. -- Hob Gadling ( talk) 10:15, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Immanuel Velikovsky article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
![]() | This ![]() It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Index 1, 2, 3, 4 |
This page has archives. Sections older than 90 days may be automatically archived by ClueBot III when more than 4 sections are present. |
There are a few things that he was correct about but no mention in the article.
For example, he was right about the high surface temperature on Venus; though his explanation/mechanics may have been off.
The same is true for extraterrestrial causes for massive cataclysms that happened to the Earth; though, again his explanations/mechanics may have been off or wrong.
Look at what is now accepted as to what happened to the Earth during its first few billion years of existence. At the time Velikovsky wrote, most of these ideas either did not exist or were summarily scoffed at.
Look at how long it took the scientists & scientific community to accept that rocks fell from the sky. We now know these as "meteorites."
Then there's one of the major causes of the 'extinction' of the dinosaurs. How long did it take the community to accept that something that big could hit the Earth.
Then there's the now accepted way of how the Moon came into existence. For the longest time the scientific community believed that it was captured by Earth's gravity. Now, the same scientific community accepts that it was created from a collision between the Earth and a near Mars-size body.
Yet with all this that is now accepted, no one even gives passing recognition to Velikovsky for helping current scientists to think out of the box and, as new movie versions/remakes are said to be, "reimagine" what could've happened.
Scientist even now accept that most of the planets have moved/wandered about the solar system and eventually settled into their current orbits.
This was one of Velikovsky's explanations/mechanics !
Scoffed at then - - - accepted now.
As such, I think that somewhere in his article some credit should be given to him.
Comments/ideas. 2600:8800:784:8F00:C23F:D5FF:FEC4:D51D ( talk) 19:21, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
The lede on this article is about as far from a neutral POV as you'll find anywhere in WP. It actually looks to be an attempt to discourage people from actually scrutinizing the evidence I.V. collected from around the world.
Did Velikovsky surmise wildly when he interpreted the evidence? There were certainly plenty of examples of that when I read his books. But look at the evidence he collected. And we know a -lot- more about the solar system than was known back then.
The 'outrage' over his interpretations has clearly diverted many from scrutinizing the evidence. It certainly collided with the hidebound worlds of orthodoxy. To this day, anyone who actually reads through 1955's Earth In Upheaval (no details about it are available on WP; that's ... interesting) has got be astounded at the depth and scope of the evidence I.V. pulled together.
In the intervening 65 years, much of this evidence has been backed up by earth-orbiting imagers (raising even more questions!), and much of it remains unexplained. Anyone can go visit these places. Like the terraces going above the snow-line in the Andes, they're not made up. The Siberian islands buried in washed-up mammoth tusks are still waiting.
Since his day we've seen (to mention just three): the emergence of plate tectonics (proposed by Wegener a half-century earlier...and adopted 10 years after I.V.'s first book) --- the recognition that the Earth has been struck by thousands of impactors (we even have government programs to watch for asteroids now) --- and that hundreds of megafauna species went suddenly extinct 13ka.
14 years after EiU, in 1969 Hamlet's Mill was published, providing more evidence (and outrage) of the weaknesses in existing theories. At that we didn't even realize that many archeological sites were observatories! THAT article actually examines the book, rather than resorting to name-calling (even adding some positive reviews ... I thoroughly enjoyed it; it's full of learning about remarkable things!)
J Harlen Bretz got pilloried for his 'catastrophism'. In the end (he outlived his critics) he won the top prize in geology. Because he was right about the evidence. (They weren't so quick to apply the hot 'pseudoscience' brand in those days.)
Gathering and publishing evidence (overlooked and unexplained to this day) is not in itself pseudoscience! I think that easy shortcut is out-of-place in any encyclopedia, particularly when it's used before a balanced appraisal, that should leave such conclusions to the reader after she has been appraised of the facts.
But that requires actually knowing the facts first. It's not clear that our authors, so far, have bothered to know them.
The meat of the article is fine, but the witch-burning rhetoric is uncalled for; a reasoning appraisal would be much more useful to the reader. Consequently, I'm adding an NPOV objection to the top of the article. Twang ( talk) 02:37, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
anyone who actually reads through 1955's Earth In Upheaval (no details about it are available on WP; that's ... interesting) has got be astounded at the depth and scope of the evidence I.V. pulled together.That is bullshit. Maybe it is true for someone who does not understand a single one of the disciplines V tried to revolutionize. But:
I am new to editing Wikipedia, and I apologize if I did something wrong by adding the quotes from Albert Einstein's letters to Velikovsky to the criticism section. I don't think they would be more appropriate if added to the Velikovskyism section under the 'Reception' heading. Could someone please advise on how to proceed? I am wondering if I should start a new section called 'Mixed criticism', perhaps, or what to do to appropriately add this information to the Immanuel Velikovsky page so that it is not again deleted. It is important that we set the record straight that Einstein engaged with Velikovsky's ideas, and it would be more than an embarrassment to the academy if a Princeton historian's unbiased record of Velikovsky-Einstein correspondence is inadequate for use on Wikipedia (not to mention that Michael D. Gordin is also inappropriately cited at the end of the first paragraph of the entry, which gives the impression that he is in favor of calling Velikovsky a pseudo-scholar; he is clearly not in favor of this sort of terminology but maintains that 'pseudoscience' lacks content and is a "term of abuse" -- please see the first few pages of the introduction to Gordin's The Pseudoscience Wars). The scientific establishment is further undermined by the fact that our most respected scientist's views are suspiciously omitted from this entry, which is why I took the time and effort to carefully edit. Thank you in advance should anyone have a suggestion for how to include this relevant and important information regarding Velikovsky's reception.
Let's talk about [1] instead of edit-warring.
@ User:David Highfield: Please read WP:BRD. Do not revert a revert.
The content is true, Velikovsky's ideas are indeed not very original. The format of the external link is wrong, and the site linked is not a reliable source. -- Hob Gadling ( talk) 10:15, 7 November 2022 (UTC)