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From: dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (D Gary Grady)
Newsgroups: net.physics
Subject: Re: The realm of physics, and the late Immanuel Velikovsky
Message-ID: <739@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 11-Nov-85 18:42:36 EST
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.739
Posted: Mon Nov 11 18:42:36 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 14-Nov-85 07:45:20 EST
References: <457@imsvax.UUCP>
Organization: Duke U Comp Ctr
Lines: 60

>           . . .  I thought you might also like to read what
>           a  couple  of  PROFESSIONAL  physicists  have  had  to  say about
>           Velikovsky.

Actually, I've read the comments of more than a couple of physicists on
the subject.

>                Robert  Bass  is  a  former  Rhodes  scholar  who ...
>           . . .   is credited
>           with the  only dynamical  explanation of  Bode's law,  and with a
>           paper in  the Summer  1974 issue  (# 8) of Pensee which basically
>           settled  once  and  for  all  the   whole  question   of  whether
>           Velikovsky's scenarios  were "physically possible".

As anyone familiar with science or common sense is well aware, no
single paper ever settles any question "once and for all."  I haven't
read the paper in question, but I'm suspicious of anything with an
abstract that says "the only explanation for x is y."  Again, common
sense is sufficient to show that this really means "the only
explanation I can think of for x is y."  In addition, there have been a
number of computer simulations bearing upon the subject of Bode's law
so Bass is certainly not the only person to offer a dynamical
explanation.  Not confining my reading to Pensee, I have seen other,
more recent analyses of the possibility of Velikovsky's planetary
billiards.  The consensus seems to be that only given some extremely
unlikely initial conditions is it possible (barely) to make it work.
Velikovsky himself, of course, didn't bother with working out the
physics of the process.  He just said it was so, and that was that.

>                I don't  have to  tell any  of you  who Albert Einstein was.
>           But did any of you know that he and Velikovsky  had been  pals at
>           the Prussian Scientific Academy . . .
>           . . .  Some of his
>           thoughts on Velikovsky may be  read  in  a  letter  TO Velikovsky
>           dated March 17, 1955:

So the kindly Dr Einstein in a brief personal letter said some nice
things to his old friend about his book?  That hardly counts as
scientific support by Einstein for Velikovsky's ideas.  Now if you
could produce a scientific paper by Einstein in support of Velikovsky,
that would be something!

>                I  am  just  an  ordinary  businessman myself, and know very
>           little of physics.  Therefore, when I read  or hear  about anyone
>           ridiculing  or  "debunking"  Velikovsky's  theories  because they
>           supposedly violate the "laws of physics", I can only assume it is
>           because they  think they know more about physics than Robert Bass
>           and Albert Einstein.  

Or do you perhaps assume that you know more about the subject than the
great majority of all the physicists, astronomers, historians,
archaeologists, geologists, folklorists, etc. who have rejected
Velikovsky's ideas as demonstrably wrong?  Not anti-dogma, not too-
original, not out-of-fashion, but simply wrong because the man didn't
understand what he was writing about?
-- 
D Gary Grady
Duke U Comp Center, Durham, NC  27706
(919) 684-3695
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