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Forbidden Science

Oh yes, in what way?
If comets were hard (like Venus), the probe would have gone clunk when it hit the surface. It went ploof. Therefore, comets are soft and fluffy.

Velikovsky may or may not be right.
He's wrong.

It seems to me though that the arguments made against Velikovsky don't hold much water or simply appeal to dogma.
Velikovsky's quote-theory-unquote violates:

1. The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics
2. Newton's First, Second and Third Laws of Motion
3. Conservation of Angular Momentum
4. Historical fact


"If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations, then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. And if your theory contradicts the facts, well, sometimes these experimentalists make mistakes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation" - Sir Arthur Eddington
 
I am dismissing conclusions that are simply stated without referring to the actual evidence they are based on. I am not simply going to accept conclusions drawn without seeing the reasoning.

I prefer to start from the facts and then come to my own conclusions.

The facts that I have actually seen on the NASA site are a list of ingredients from the spectral analysis. They seem to include materials one would expect to find in the crust of an earth like planet and hydrocarbons.

This seems to support Velikovsky's ideas rather than refute them.

Leaving aside the comet for the moment, how, then, do you deal with the straightforward fact that Velikovsky predicted hydrocarbons in Venus's atmosphere, and there are no hydrocarbons there? There seems to be little room for reasoning or drawing conclusions there--there just ain't no hydrocarbons.
 
OK, I understand now. What evidence is there that Venus' atmosphere is mostly CO2? I understand the conclusion of the Mariner II probe was that it contained hydrocarbon clouds.
 
OK, I understand now. What evidence is there that Venus' atmosphere is mostly CO2? I understand the conclusion of the Mariner II probe was that it contained hydrocarbon clouds.

The Venera and Vega that landed there recorded the makeup of the atmosphere.
 
1) The so called "conclusions" that Mariner II found hydrocarbon clouds on Venus were later tracked down to a off the cuff remark by one of the research team during a press conference.

2) On the rare occassions that Velikovsky was right he was not original. When he was original he was usually wrong.

3) THe hypothesis that Venus was hot was NOT original to Velikovsky. If my memory is right, it was originally made by a guy called Wildt(??) ten years before Velikovsky.

4) Love, why do you want to believe Velikovsky? As Carl Sagan said, there is more evidence for the God of Abraham than for the Venus of Dr Velikovsky.
If (as you appear to be from my limited reading of your posts) you are a YEC, you dont need Velikovsky. All can be explained by G**.

Go away and play
 
1) The so called "conclusions" that Mariner II found hydrocarbon clouds on Venus were later tracked down to a off the cuff remark by one of the research team during a press conference.

2) On the rare occassions that Velikovsky was right he was not original. When he was original he was usually wrong.

3) THe hypothesis that Venus was hot was NOT original to Velikovsky. If my memory is right, it was originally made by a guy called Wildt(??) ten years before Velikovsky.

4) Love, why do you want to believe Velikovsky? As Carl Sagan said, there is more evidence for the God of Abraham than for the Venus of Dr Velikovsky.
If (as you appear to be from my limited reading of your posts) you are a YEC, you dont need Velikovsky. All can be explained by G**.

Go away and play


Oh it goes past yec. Love has explained that my anger caused my cancer and if I were to believe hard enough, I could cure myself with wishful thinking.

You're not dealing with a competent critical thinker here, BH.
 
4) Love, why do you want to believe Velikovsky? As Carl Sagan said, there is more evidence for the God of Abraham than for the Venus of Dr Velikovsky.
Heck, there's more evidence for UrsulaV's super-intelligent ammonites than for Velikovsky's ideas.
 
Example- if comets were not "fluffy" the behavior of the probes sent to meet them would be different. Why? Check an equation derived by a certain Newton.
Oh yes, in what way?

You know, gravity acceleration depends on mass. If comets were composed by dense material (Fe, Mg, Ca silicates, Fe Ni alloys) the gravity pull they exerted on the probes would be stronger.

OK, so animals lived in Siberia. How did they adapt to a sub-zero climate and having zero precipitation?

Well, I have bad news for you. Right now there are several animals living at places with sub-zero temperatures. And who said precipitation was zero? It was juts not big enough to cause the accumulation of ice as continental glaciers.

Velikovsky may or may not be right. It seems to me though that the arguments made against Velikovsky don't hold much water or simply appeal to dogma.

Wrong. Velikovisky's theories are dogmas for you. And they have very little -if any- data supporting them.
 
That's not an argument, that's contradiction. The implied argument being Velikovsky is wrong because his theories contradict well-established facts?
Just to clarify:

YES.

That's kind of what "wrong" means.

And he would have gotten away with it, too...
 
Oh it goes past yec. Love has explained that my anger caused my cancer and if I were to believe hard enough, I could cure myself with wishful thinking.

You're not dealing with a competent critical thinker here, BH.

And that the twin towers were brought down due to the explosives mixed into the concrete during their construction...
 
The main reason I believe Velikovsky is that it explains many things so well. It explains the mystery of our modern calender. It explains why so many cultures developed myths about planetary gods and their destructive power from what we currently observe as faint dots in the sky. It explains why so many scholars simply recorded the fact that Venus was a comet. It explains the unusual distribution of ice in the last ice age. It explains why people believe in religions and fear an apocalypse or return of the Lord, where they will be judged. It explains why certain symbols were used in representing the planets. It explains why people wrote about before there was a moon in the sky, or when the days were shorter. It explains why people have explicitly stated different measurements for the number of days in a lunar month and in a year, and talk about the calendars being adjusted or recalculated.

I feel the science will eventually catch up, but astronomy is quite young, and is not yet settled in its views. It was built on a belief in a basically unchanging solar system. The stories I have heard about the formation of planets, the mass of the universe, the Hubble constant etc. have changed within my lifetime. It is no big stretch to believe they will change again.

It may seem impossible to you now, but I am also aware that science declared many things to be impossible before they were done e.g. manned flight.

The science I can actually discern for myself simply makes my belief in Velikovsky stronger.

Ignoring the ad hominem attacks, the actual arguement against Velikovsky seems to be based on the accepted fact that Venus is
a) not a comet, and
b) does not have hydrocarbons in its atosphere.

I have tried to reconstruct how the conclusion of (b) was reached.
So far I have discovered that a KOH manometer was used to measure CO2 in the earlier probes. I am not sure how well this works with hydrocarbons, but it should be possible to find out.

I also understand that the clouds surrounding Venus are in the upper atmosphere. So any ideas about the composition of the lower atmosphere is largely irrelevant.

There are conjectures about the clouds containing sulphuric acid. I cannot find a source that says that they do not contain hydrocarbons, and how this is determined. Can anyone point me at one?

Here is a particularly telling quote:
Following Venera-9 and 10, seven more mass spectrometers of increasing sophistication and accuracy were deployed to Venus. One was onboard the Pioneer Venus, and produced useful data despite the micro-pore intakes being plugged by cloud droplets between 50 km to 28 km, where the droplets boiled away.
A few days later, Venera-11 and 12 deployed model MKh-6411 mass spectrometers developed by V.G. Istomin. To avoid the problem of clogged micro-pore intakes, a pulsed piezoelectric valve opened a relatively large hole for a brief instant. They also avoided the cloud layer by switching on at an altitude of 25 km.

There is almost no ozone in Earth's lower atmosphere, yet quite a bit in the ozone layer.

So it simply isn't as simple as Venus is 97% CO2 and 3% N2 therefore no hydrocarbons, because there is a structure to the atmosphere.

I also believe that iron and sulphur (brimstone) were detected higher up in the atmosphere of Venus, which explains Velikovsky's red dust preceding the plagues. I find it very confirming when this sort of evidence presents itself, when I am not even looking for it.
 
The main reason I believe Velikovsky is that it explains many things so well.

It has been pointed out to you that the things it explains did not happen, and the things that did happen it does not explain.

It explains the mystery of our modern calender. It explains why so many cultures developed myths about planetary gods and their destructive power from what we currently observe as faint dots in the sky. It explains why so many scholars simply recorded the fact that Venus was a comet. It explains the unusual distribution of ice in the last ice age. It explains why people believe in religions and fear an apocalypse or return of the Lord, where they will be judged. It explains why certain symbols were used in representing the planets. It explains why people wrote about before there was a moon in the sky, or when the days were shorter. It explains why people have explicitly stated different measurements for the number of days in a lunar month and in a year, and talk about the calendars being adjusted or recalculated.

No.

If Velikovsky was right, none of these things would have happened.

Ignoring the ad hominem attacks, the actual arguement against Velikovsky seems to be based on the accepted fact that Venus is
a) not a comet, and
b) does not have hydrocarbons in its atosphere

Then you missed 98% of the argument.

Velikovsky claimed that the close approach of Venus stopped the rotation of the Earth (or as you would have it, the rotation of the Earth's crust).

First, either one of those events would have killed every living thing on the planet.

Second, neither one is mechanically possible for a close approach of Venus. There is no possible trajectory for Venus that could affect the Earth's rotation to this degree that doesn't involve the intersection of the two bodies, which would not only kill every living thing on Earth, but destroy both planets entirely. I feel quite comfortable in asserting that this did not happen.

Velikovsky's idea is both impossible and wrong. It is impossible in that it requires mechanisms that flatly contradict everything we know, and it is wrong in that it necessitates events that did not happen.
 

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