Talk:Immanuel Velikovsky/Archive 4

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The word 'pseudoscientific'

The article now says that Velikovsky's work is pseudoscientific. While I'm pretty sure I agree, I think this is the sort of widely agreed-upon judgment that isn't entirely neutral and that an encyclopedia should put in quotation marks. Compare someone who is generally regarded as evil or honest. I think it's not too controversial to suggest that sentences like "He was evil" or "He was honest" are out of place on Wikipedia. Instead it would be better to say "He is widely regarded as evil" and "He is widely regarded as honest." For that reason, I'm going to change the article to say "His work is often described as an example of pseudoscience." If you believe that his work is pseudoscientific, I think you should prefer this approach, since it makes the article sound more credible. Making the point too dogmatically may actually backfire and cause readers to be suspicious of the article. Omphaloscope talk 18:10, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

Nothing dogmatic about that. We follow the sources. In the cases where expert opinions are slightly divided, we do use the approach you recommend. But that is not the case here. Anybody who suggests Velikovsky was not a pseudoscientist would be immediately laughed out of town. --Hob Gadling (talk) 05:24, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Velikovsky was right on some things

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)

Old hat.

"High temperature of Venus": Very old hat. He did not specify any Kelvin value, he just said "hot" instead of "cold", which gives his guess an expected hit rate of 50%. If we called that a success in the article, we should do the same for articles about those 50% of clairvoyants who happened to correctly predict the winner of an election with two parties.

It's even worse for "extraterrestrial causes". There are two possibilities: terrestrial or extraterrestrial. In this case, both are applicable to "cataclysms", whatever you mean by that - what Velikovsky meant was things that never happened, such as the sun standing still at Gideon - giving him an expected hit rate of 100%, since "terrestrial causes" would have been a "hit" too.

And so on. This attempt to justify the fantasies of a crackpot is feeble bullshit, and it is the same feeble bullshit that is always used by people who fell for V's fantasies due to their own ignorance of how science works. --Hob Gadling (talk) 05:22, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

2600:8800:784:8F00:C23F:D5FF:FEC4:D51D has little to offer about the claimed "few things that he was correct about" and none of them merit inclusion in the article.

Hob Gadling has dealt with a couple of them. The only other is the claim that "most of the planets have moved/wandered about the solar system and eventually settled into their current orbits". No scientist accepts that this happened within historic times, as Velikovsky claimed.

As for the assertion that "no one even gives passing recognition to Velikovsky for helping current scientists to think out of the box", there is absolutely no evidence that Velikovsky has had any influence whatsoever on the conclusions of "current scientists".

-- Jmc (talk) 19:36, 12 February 2020 (UTC)