We had a snowstorm this week.
I barely slept that night thanks to the wind whistling past the windows and the scraaaaape of the plows clearing the street, and by Wednesday morning I had what felt like a vise squeezing my skull. More ibuprofren, extra sleep, hot baths, sinus pills...they helped enough that I was able to go to work, but what was now quite clearly a migraine didn’t ease until this afternoon. Even now I can still feel it lurking just under the surface, waiting to resurrect itself.
Needless to say, I’m going to bed early tonight.
And in case you hadn’t already guessed, I had about as much interest in concentrating on a computer screen as I did in doing a swan dive off the Hancock Tower into Copley Square.
So despite all my good intentions, tonight I bring you not a new diary, but a rewind from all the way back in 2011. I will be back in two weeks with a fresh foray into Badbookistan, but tonight I have a hot date with a cup of tea while you, my faithful readers, will have to content yourself with a trifle I called
When he was in graduate school, my father worked briefly as an encyclopedia salesman.
He also played trumpet in a dance band to pay for whatever the GI didn’t cover, and years after his death we had the sheet music for his trumpet exercises stuffed on the top shelf of a coat closet. Dad loved everything from classical to jazz and folk, and it wasn’t until the advent of acid rock in the late 1960s that he stopped listening to popular music; his record collection included everything from Mendelssohn to Glen Yarbrough and the Limelighters, with a generous leavening of Tom Lehrer and the Kingston Trio. He even managed a small folk club at the community college he worked for near Cleveland, and to this day I can’t watch A Mighty Wind without practically being on the floor.
The encyclopedia phase left nearly as deep a mark. My parents owned a complete set of the encyclopedia Dad had tried to peddle, as well as the sample volume he’d taken on his rounds, but as readable as it was, our World Book was but a gateway drug in comparison to the glories of my uncle Oscar’s 1968 Encyclopaedia Britannica. This was the last edition before Mortimer Adler’s awkward, frustrating Macro/Micropedia rearrangement of the classic format, and by the time I was twelve I was hooked. I read large chunks of it whenever we visited, and after we moved back to Pittsburgh it was the first place I turned when writing papers and doing basic research for middle and high school.
Even better, each spring my uncle would receive not one but two updates to his Britannica: a general book of the previous year’s events, cultural trends, and significant deaths, and a science yearbook covering notable advances and discoveries in astronomy, medicine, physics, cosmology, and biology. Black holes, archaeological discoveries, early computing advances, conservation methods for damaged artwork, Voyager’s launch…if it had to do with science or medicine, the Britannica covered it all. I still remember being fascinated by the little article in the early 1970s on the promising field of ultrasonography and other new imaging technologies, never dreaming that many years later that same wonderful technology would both tell me why I was slowly going deaf in one ear and allow me to avoid painful and risky skull surgery.
Best of all, the Britannica’s yearbooks inoculated me against the tidal wave of nonsense that passed for popular science in the 1960s and 1970s.
Oh, I read some of what PZ Myer has dubbed “woo-woo” growing up; it was scarcely possible to breathe without seeing at least one or two books about the Bermuda Triangle, UFO abductions, ESP, reincarnation, astrology, alternative medicine, alternative physics, or the wonders of pyramid power. I’ve already discussed some of the more egregious silliness of the New Age in a previous diary, but the New Age was only one facet of a truly awe-inspiring mountain of popular but scientifically worthless books that have poured from America’s presses for the last half century.
That’s not to say that all of these theories and their ancillary books are worthless; going vegetarian can indeed save your life, the continents really do move, and meditating can reduce high blood pressure. But for every unusual theory that has some value, there are at least a dozen that are an utter waste of wood pulp and pasteboard. They may be popular – the books I bring tonight hit the bestseller lists and are still in print - but they have all the scientific validity of the phlogistonal theory of matter.
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Tonight for your consideration I offer two wondrously awful books tied together by a common obsession with visitors from another planet. One was written in a valiant attempt to propound a new theory of physics that just coincidentally happened to support its author's deep Orthodox Jewish faith, while the other propounded a theory that is not only ridiculous, but more than a little racist:
Worlds in Collision, by Immanuel Velikovsky. Immanuel Velikovsky seemed an unlikely candidate to write a bestselling science book. Born in Russia in 1890, the devoutly religious Velikovsky was a distinguished psychiatrist and scholar who had played a minor role in founding Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He was a committed Zionist, a devoted family man, had published a dozen or so articles on medical and psychiatric subjects, and enjoyed what appeared to be a solid, respectable career as a psychoanalyst in New York.
All this changed in the 1940s when he began to investigate what he saw as flaws in the Einsteinian and Newtonian theories of celestial mechanics. Velikovsky was deeply read in Near Eastern mythology and the Hebrew scriptures, and he could not square these ancient writings with what he read in contemporary astronomy books. He read, and read, and eventually became convinced that something catastrophic and hitherto unaccounted for by modern science had taken place around 1500 BCE to account for such Biblical events as the sun standing still to permit a Hebrew victory, the parting of the Red Sea, and Noah’s Flood, not necessarily in that order. He read, and read, and even wrote to Harlow Shapley, star of the Harvard astronomy department.
Shapley at first dismissed Velikovsky as yet another ignorant crank. Then Velikovsky wrote a series of pamphlets just after World War II outlining his ideas, and Shapley began to suspect that the psychiatrist had greater plans than the usual misunderstood genius’s self-published screeds distributed to family, friends, and collectors of assorted weirdness.
Just what Velikovsky did have in mind became evident when Macmillan Publishers announced Velikovsky’s first book, Worlds in Collision, accompanied by a illustrative sky show at Hayden Planetarium explaining just what this bold, startling, groundbreaking book proposed. Word filtered through the astronomical community, and soon scholarly decorum had given way to howls of fury from virtually every astronomer in the United States, led by Harlow Shapley and his colleague Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.
Even as Worlds in Collision rocketed up the bestseller lists, Macmillan, which had a textbook division and a reputation for only publishing scientifically sound books, transferred Worlds in Collision to Doubleday within the first two months of publication to prevent every astronomy professor in America from switching to a different publisher.By now you are probably wondering just what it was that had transformed the normally peaceable scientific community into a mob of peasants with torches out to drive Velikovsky and his foul heresies from the land.
Behold what mighty insanityinsights a brilliant mind with no relevant knowledge of a subject may produce:
- Earth has suffered global catastrophes, both before and during recorded history.
- Those catastrophes happening during historical times were the origin of the myths, legends, and early writings of all ancient cultures and societies. One of Velikovsky’s favorite examples of this was that the Hebrew Scriptures, the ancient Greeks, and the Manu people of India had all recorded a huge, devastating, worldwide flood, so obviously there had actually been a huge, devastating, worldwide flood.
- The origin of these catastrophes were close encounters between Earth and other planets, including Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and most notably Venus, which had begun as a comet expelled from Jupiter, swept by Earth several times, and finally settled into its current orbit.
- Newton and Einstein were both wrong about celestial mechanics since their theories did not account for the repeated, recent visits by Comet Venus.
- Although Velikovsky did not offer a competing mathematical system, he believed that electromagnetism might have accounted for the startling discrepancies between his discoveries and conventional science.
Specific examples included beauties such as:
- The Deluge had been caused by Saturn going nova (!) before settling into its current orbit.
- Mercury was somehow involved in the Tower of Babel episode.
- Jupiter had caused the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah
not those evil, wicked gays, so would someone please tell Michele Bachmann?.
- Mars had come close enough to wreak repeated havoc in the 7th and 8th centuries BCE.
- Venus, once Jupiter had vomited her forth from the Great Red Spot, had been responsible for the parting of the Red Sea, the feeding of the Hebrews by dropping clouds of edible “carbohydrates” produced by the “hydrocarbons” in her atmosphere (aka manna), and Joshua’s successful plea for the sun to stand still during battle (actually the Earth ceasing to rotate).
One can see why Shapley, Payne-Gaposchkin, and the rest of the scientific community were a wee bit upset.
Velikovsky, stung by the rejection of the community he had hoped to enlighten, removed an appendix detailing his theories on celestial mechanics from the book in hopes that Worlds in Collision would be judged solely by its investigation of comparative mythology. Alas for him, too many copies with the original appendix were in circulation for this to work. Worse, Macmillan had initially included Worlds in Collision in its scientific textbook catalogue, so plenty of scientists knew exactly what he’d written and were sharpening their knives for the kill.
Despite all this, Worlds in Collision sold briskly and continues to do so. Literary critics who were not familiar with modern sciences praised its bold new ideas, readers who knew even less found it fascinating, and before long there was a small but determined Velikovskian cult convinced that their hero had discovered something new and exciting. After all, hadn’t he predicted that Venus would have a high surface temperature? And that Jupiter produced radio waves? And weren’t the Venusian clouds just teaming with those wonderful (and tasty!) hydrocarbons (or was it carbohydrates?)? That the answer to all of the above was a resounding “no” seemed irrelevant, especially when the thin, impressive learned Dr. Velikovsky kept insisting that those silly scientists were wrong because they had ignored the evidence of human myth in favor of their cold equations.
No less a figure than Carl Sagan finally weighed in on Velikovsky’s ideas in his 1977 Scientists Confront Velikovsky, a clear, detailed, and devastating evisceration of Worlds in Collision and Velikovsky’s other writings, most notably two equally ridiculous sequels, Ages in Chaos and Earth in Upheaval. Although Velikovsky himself protested mightily that he had never received a fair hearing, subsequent geological and botanical evidence has conclusively shown that his theories were about as valid as the old alchemical belief that lead could be transmuted into gold.
Even worse, religious experts and archaeologists did an equal thorough dismantling of Velikovsky’s handling of myth, legend, and ancient Near Eastern texts. By the 1980s very few Velikovskians were still active, and he is best remembered as yet another stubborn old crank who couldn’t accept scientific fact.
For all this, Velikovsky’s writings did serve one valuable purpose: Worlds in Collision and its companion volumes revived the old concept of catastrophism, the belief that a single huge disaster could have worldwide consequences. Subsequent research has shown that there were indeed such catastrophes in Earth’s past, most notably an asteroid strike in the late Cretaceous that killed off the last dinosaurs, while modern archaeology and geology suggest that there was indeed a huge flood in the late Neolithic near the Black Sea that may have lead at many removes to the myth of Noah’s Flood.
Velikovsky would no doubt be pleased, even if there is still no evidence for those nourishing, toothsome Venusian carbohydrates (or were they hydrocarbons?) raining down from the heavens to nourish the hungry Israelites.
Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Daniken - Erich von Daniken was best known, if at all, as a failed hotelier when his first book came out. Born in 1935, he had worked primarily in the hospitality industry in his native Switzerland, barring a three year stint in jail for embezzlement. This unfortunate blot on his resume did not prevent the said first book, 1967’s Chariots of the Gods?, from becoming an immediate bestseller in English speaking countries, or keep Daniken’s collected works from selling over 60 million copies and being translated into 32 languages.
These books, which are written in an engagingly breathless style, purport to prove that Earth has been visited repeatedly by “ancient astronauts” – extraterrestrials who had visited our planet in the distant past, mated with our women, and helped to build ancient monuments in areas where human technology was simply too primitive to have produced anything more than stick dwellings or adobe huts. As evidence he cites archaeological “mysteries” such as the following:
- The Antikythera mechanism, a corroded artifcate pulled from a late Roman shipwreck.
- Stonehenge, which was clearly too complex to have been built by Iron Age Britons.
- The Easter Island statues, obviously beyond the technological capacity of the Polynesian natives.
- Paleolithic carvings and petroglyphs showing mysterious “helmeted” figures resembling astronauts, most notably in Australia, where most of the inhabitants didn’t even wear clothes until the arrival of British missionaries.
- The tomb of Mayan ruler Pacal the Great, which seems to depict a nattily dressed “astronaut” preparing for takeoff despite the lack of rocket science in the jungles of Central America and the presence of a large bird sitting on the nose of his spacecraft.
- The Nazca lines, which only make sense when viewed from above – and of course the local tribes didn’t have airplanes until the 20th century.
Naturally these startling revelations were met with great resistance from archaeologists, who just as naturally were pooh-poohed by Daniken and ignored by the enthralled public; complaints by experimental archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl that he and a team of Easter Island natives had carved and set up one of the giant statues using only techniques well known on the island were brushed aside as mere jealousy, while attempts by professional scholars to explain that every single one of Daniken’s “mysteries” was easily within the capability of its culture of origin never made it into his books.
Anthropologists were equally unhappy, since with rare exceptions almost all of supposed evidence of otherworldly visitors (the walls of Cuzco, the monuments of Tiahuanaco, the pyramids of Giza, etc.) was in non-Western countries, while equally impressive artifacts produced with equally primitive technology by Europeans (the monuments of ancient Rome, Chartres Cathedral, the Parthenon) or documented East Asian cultures (the Great Wall of China, Angkor Wat) were not questioned. Daniken never explained why only dark-skinned cultures in Asia or Africa seemed to need this extra technological boost from extraterrestrials, and why the said dark-skinned cultures' own myths, legends, and written accounts should be ignored in favor of Daniken's theories.
Despite the criticism, Daniken’s popularity, and sales, soared. Attempts at refutation sold only to those who found Daniken’s ideas ridiculous, and soon there were other authors expounding on cosmic visitors from the past. The most unusual was probably Clifford Wilson’s Crash Go the Chariots, which debunked von Daniken on the basis that a strict reading of Genesis showed that God had created the Earth about six thousand years ago without the assistance of aliens, but there were plenty of others.
Worse, multiple authors read von Daniken, decided that he was right, and penned their own accounts of how all those primitive non-white cultures had to have had a little extraterrestrial boost to build their monuments, create their art, and write their poetry. Perhaps the most fascinating book was the late, great Zecharia Sitchin’s The Earth Chronicles series, which explores at great length the idea that ancient Mesopotamian gods were actually astronauts from the planet Nibiru, and the asteroid belt the shattered remnants of the planet Tiamet. The only one with even a tiny scap of scientific merit was Robert Temple, whose examination of the religion of the African Dogon tribe, The Sirius Mystery, revealed startling similarities to modern astronomical discoveries about the Dog Star. Alas, even this was quickly debunked when it was found that the Dogons had had extensive contact with modern missionaries prior to their mythology being written down.
Eventually the fad faded, as all fads do. Astronomers such as Carl Sagan (again) explained calmly that though there was no reason there couldn’t have been ancient astronauts, there was no evidence that they’d ever existed, while respected publications like Scientific American, The Skeptical Inquirer, and The National Geographic debunked claim after claim; the Antikythera Mechanism was a late Roman astronomical calculator, Stonehenge was a British ceremonial site, the Australian petroglyphs showed spirit forms, not astronauts, and so on. Daniken’s books continued to sell, albeit less and less well as time passed, and today he's widely regarded as yet another 70’s relic like mood rings, polyester bell bottoms, and green eyeshadow.
Daniken himself is alive and well and still writing. He’s admitted livening up some of his books with non-factual incidents, most notably Gold of the Gods, but that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to insist that Earth has been visited numerous times by ancient astronauts. His most recent book, The Gods Never Left Us, came out just last year, and he shows no signs of slowing down. One wonders what’s next for this amazing, if appalling, writer.
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And so, gentle readers, what say you? Did you reader Chariots of the Gods into tatters? Is there a yellowed copy of Zecharia Sitchin in your attic? Velikovsky in your basement? Or did you manage to avoid the whole ancient astronaut craze because you were disco dancing or baking organic whole wheat bread? God knows I read enough Daniken to drive my mother crazy, but eventually I got better – what about you? Don’t be shy….
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