Immanuel Velikovsky

I have just listened to this man and read him for the first time, which given his intellectual greatness is most certainly due to censorship and poor educators, and all I can say is "wow." The religious reaction to his scientific claims was so fundamentalist and extreme that it has been the subject of psychological and psychiatric studies and papers in peer-reviewed journals and is what is known as the Velikovsky Affair.

Like Galileo, Velikovsky was ridiculed in his time by the mainstream religious establishment but time has vindicated Velikovsky.

Here are 3 Velikovsky claims.

Claim Number 1: Uniformitarianism is false.

"The sea erupted. Often the sea and land changed places. The immutability of contours of continents and seas, a dogma in geology, has no basis in fact. And immediately there is the problem of the climate. There were ancient climates that were very different from what they are today. If those corals grew where they were found, certainly the Earth was not travelling with the same elements of rotation and revolution which means not in the same orbit, not with the axis directed in the same position as it is today. If you don't believe it, try to cultivate corals on the North Pole." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966

Claim Number 2: Venus is hot.

"And Venus must be hot if the history of the solar system is not the history of no change for billions of years. And Venus was found hot, not room temperature as was thought until 1959. In 1961 it was detected with radio means that it is like something like 600 Farenheit and Mariner 2 was sent out to find out true or not true? It was found that even more it is full 800 [degrees Farenheit]." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966

Claim Number 3: Jupiter emits radio waves.

"But then if there were events of this character, discharges between planets and so on, I put one of the most outrageous claims before the scientific readers, that in the solar system and in the universe generally, not just gravitation and inertia are the two forces of action but that also electricity and magnetism are participating in the mechanism, so the Lord was not just a watchmaker. The universe is not free of those forces with which the man makes his life easy already more than 100 years. They were unknown practically or little known in the time of Newton in the second half of the 17th century. But today we know that electricity and magnetism, these are not just small phenomena that we can repeat as a kind of a little trick in the lab, that they permeate every field from neurology into botony and chemistry and astronomy should not be free...and it was admitted by authorities that this was the most outrageous point in my claims. But the vengeance came early and swiftly. In 1960, already in 1955, radio noises from Jupiter were detected and this was one of the crucial tests that I offered for the truth of my theory. In 1958, the magnetosphere was discovered around the Earth, another claim. In 1960, the interplanetary magnetic field was discovered and solar plasma, so-called solar wind, moving rapidly along the magnetic lines and then it was discovered that the electromagnetic field of the Earth reaches the moon ." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966

"Our debate ended on Friday, April 8, 1955, only nine days before Einstein’s death. I think I was the last person with whom he discussed a scientific problem. On that day I brought him the published news that Jupiter sends out radio noises; ten months earlier, in a letter to him, I had offered to stake our dispute on this my claim of an as yet undiscovered phenomenon..." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1976

The radio noises of Jupiter that were only predicted by Velikovsky are available on Youtube:



He was Albert Einstein's best friend and neighbor late in life and wrote a book on the subject titled Before The Day Breaks. Einstein and Velikovsky exchanged many letters which are available online.

Here are some highlights:

"Here is the year 1845. Leverrier in France and Adams in England, out of perturbations of Uranus calculated, to the exactness of one degree of arc, the presence of a yet unseen planet. Both of them assumed that a planet of a size not larger than that of Uranus travels on an orbit at a distance dictated by Bode’s law. Neptune is actually of the size of Uranus, but the mean distance between their orbits is not ca. 1,750,000,000 miles, as Bode’s law required, but only ca. 1,000,000,000 miles; thus the error is equal to ascribing to Neptune a triple mass. The discovery of Pluto did not solve the conflict between the theory and the fact and caused also conflicting estimates of Pluto’s mass. Thus the finding of the planetary stations in relation to a chart of fixed stars is not enough; if the theory is true the distances must also be correct. And still the discovery of Neptune is regarded as the strongest proof of the Newtonian theory of celestial motions.

Now in the same 1845, the year of this triumph, Leverrier calculated also the anomaly of Mercury, and by this caused to think that the Newtonian law of gravitation may be not precisely true. Leverrier first thought of some planet moving inside the Mercurial orbit or of a possible unequal distribution of the mass in the sun. You have used the fact of the anomaly to prove that the space is curving in the presence of a mass. About the same time—in 1913—G. E. Hale published his paper on “The general magnetic field of the sun” (Contr. M. Wilson Obs., #71), in which he estimated the general magnetic field of the sun as of 50 Gauss intensity. At this intensity “under certain conditions electromagnetic forces are much stronger than gravitation.” (Alfven) The last named author in his “cosmical Electro-dynamics” (Oxford, 1950, p. 2) shows that a hydrogen atom at the distance of the earth from the sun and moving with the earth’s orbital velocity, if ionized, is acted upon by the solar magnetic field ten thousand times stronger than by the solar gravitational field."

Here is a May 1966 speech he gave to a parochial school in mp3 format known as From Book to Book and Land to Land. In it he uses his now famous expression "Collective Amnesia."