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Immanuel Velikovsky (June 10, 1895 (NS) – November 17, 1979) is best known as the author of a number of controversial books on pre-history, particularly the US bestseller Worlds in Collision (1950). Earlier in his life, he played a role in the founding of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was a respected psychiatrist/psychoanalyst.

His books primarily used comparative mythology and ancient literary sources (not least the Bible) to propose that the Earth had suffered catastrophic close-contacts with other planets in the solar system (principally Venus and Mars), during and before recorded history. He argued that electromagnetic effects played an important role in celestial mechanics. He also proposed a revised chronology of Ancient Egypt, Greece, Palestine and the Near East, aiming to eliminate so-called Dark Ages and reconcile Biblical history with both archeology and Egyptian chronology.

Generally, Velikovsky's theories were vigorously rejected by the academic community, but despite, or perhaps because of this, Velikovsky's books sold well. (Indeed, the conduct of many academics supported Velikovsky's claims of "suppressed genius" in which he likened himself to martyred Renaissance scientist/heretic Giordano Bruno.) Controversy continues to this day, with refutation and counter-refutation, and ongoing claims of both rebuttal and substantiation.

Biography

Childhood and education

Immanuel Velikovsky was born in 1895 into a Jewish family, in Vitebsk in what is today Belarus, the son of Shimon (Simon Yehiel) Velikovsky (1859-1937) and Beila Grodensky. He learned several languages as a child, performed exceptionally well in Russian and mathematics at the Medvednikov Gymnasium after moving to Moscow, and graduated with a gold medal in 1913. He then travelled to Europe, visiting Palestine, briefly studying medicine at Montpellier, France, and taking premedical courses at the University of Edinburgh.Having returned to Russia before the outbreak of World War I, Velikovsky enrolled in the University of Moscow and received a medical degree in 1921.

Berlin

Then he left Russia for Berlin. There, using funding from his father Simon, Velikovsky edited and published a pair of volumes of scientific papers, some written in Hebrew, entitled SCRIPTA UNIVERSITATIS ATQUE BIBLIOTHECAE HIEROSOLYMITANARUM ("Writings of the Jerusalem University & Library"). He enlisted Albert Einstein to prepare the mathematical-physical volume. This project was a precursor to the formation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—the fledgling university was able to donate copies of the Scripta to the libraries of other academic institutions, who would then send complimentary copies of their own publications, thus helping the Jerusalem University to stock its library. In 1924 Velikovsky married Elisheva Kramer, a young violinist.

Career as a psychiatrist

From 1924 to 1939 Velikovsky lived in Palestine, practicing medicine (both general practice and psychiatry), and also psychoanalysis (he had studied under Sigmund Freud's pupil, Wilhelm Stekel in Vienna). During this time he had a dozen or so papers published in medical and psychoanalytic journals, including, in 1930, the first paper to suggest epileptics are characterized by pathological encephalograms, now part of the routine diagnostic procedure, and papers in Freud's Imago, including a precious analysis of Freud's own dreams.

Relocation to the USA and subsequent notoriety as an author

In 1939, with the prospect of war looming, Velikovsky travelled with his family to New York, intending to spend a sabbatical year researching for his book Oedipus & Akhnaton (which, inspired by Freud's Moses and Monotheism, explored the possibility that Pharaoh Akhnaton was the legendary Oedipus). Within weeks of his arrival, World War II began. Soon, taking a tangent from his original book project, Velikovsky began to develop the radical catastrophist cosmology and revised chronology theories for which he would become notorious (see below). For the remainder of the Second World War, now a permanent resident in New Jersey, he continued to research and write about his ideas, searching for a means to disseminate them to academia and the public. He privately published two small Scripta Academica pamphlets summarising his theories in 1945 (Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History and Cosmos Without Gravitation). His pressing a copy of the latter onto astronomer Harlow Shapley was to have particular repercussions.

In 1950, after eight publishing houses rejected the Worlds in Collision manuscript, it was finally published by Macmillan, who had a large presence in the academic textbook market. Even before its appearance, the book was enveloped by furious controversy, when Harpers' Magazine published a highly positive feature on it, with what would today be called a creationist slant. This came to the attention of a horrified Shapley, who had thought Cosmos Without Gravitation to be pseudoscientific nonsense. Commentators have also noted that Shapley was a liberal who had suffered under the McCarthyite witchunts against communism, whilst Velikovsky happened to be a Russian. Shapley mobilised a campaign against Worlds in Collision within academia: within two months Macmillan, intimidated by threats of a textbook boycott, transferred the book to Doubleday. It was by then a best seller in the US.

In 1952, Doubleday published the first installment in Velikovsky's revised chronology, Ages in Chaos, followed by the Earth in Upheaval (a geological volume) in 1955.

For most of the 1950s and early 1960s, Velikovsky was persona non grata on college and university campuses. An early space probe sent to Venus appeared to confirm some of his predictions, most specifically that Venus would be hot. After this, he began to receive more requests to speak. He lectured, frequently to record crowds, at universities across North America.

In 1972, Velikovsky's public profile was raised still higher when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a one-hour television special featuring Velikovsky and his work, and this was followed by a thirty-minute documentary on the BBC in 1973.

The remainder of the 1970s saw Velikovsky devoting a great deal of his time and energy rebutting his critics in academia, and continuing to tour North America and also Europe, delivering lectures on his theories. Several independent societies and journals sprang up to provide a forum for his work, including Pensée and Kronos in the US, and the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies in the UK.

By now an elderly man, Velikovsky suffered from diabetes and intermittent depression, seemingly brought on by the academic establishment's continuing rejection of his work, and many wondered if the remaining promised volumes of his work (including a prequel to Worlds in Collision and the projected sequels to Ages in Chaos) would ever see publication.

The last two years of his life finally saw publication of two volumes of the aforementioned Ages in Chaos series: Peoples of the Sea (1977) and Rameses II and his Time (1978). Velikovsky died tended by his wife at his Princeton home in November 17, 1979.

Posthumous administration of Velikovsky's literary estate

Legal wranglings appear to have dogged the release of remaining unpublished work. Velikovsky had appointed Professor Lynn E Rose as his literary executor, with plans to issue several more volumes. However, his family managed to retain control of his literary estate. Under the supervision of Velikovsky's wife, two posthumous books appeared: the psychoanalytic work Mankind in Amnesia (1982) and also Stargazers and Gravediggers (1983), which chronicled the hostility of academia to Velikovsky's work.

For many years Velikovsky's estate was controlled by his two daughters, who generally resisted the publication of any further material. (Exceptions include the biography ABA - the Trial and the Torment, issued in the mid-1990s and greeted with rather dubious reviews; and a Hebrew translation of another Ages in Chaos volume, The Dark Age of Greece, was published in Israel.)

In the late 1990s, a large portion of Velikovsky's unpublished book manuscripts, essays and correspondence became available at the Velikovsky Archive website. In 2005, Velikovsky's daughter Ruth Sharon, presented his entire archive to Princeton University Library.

Velikovsky's Theories

Notwithstanding Velikovsky's dozen or so publications in medical and psychoanlytic journals in the 1920s and 1930s, the work for which he became well known was developed by him during the early 1940s, whilst living in New York. He summarised his core ideas in an affidavit in November 1942, and in two privately published Scripta Academica pamphlets entitled Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History (1945) and Cosmos without Gravitation (1946).

In reality, these theories formed a coherent inter-disciplinary whole. However, rather than have the entire edifice dismissed because of potential flaws in any one area, and with the doors of academic journals seemingly now closed to him, Velikovsky then chose to publish them as a series of book volumes, aimed at a lay audience, dealing separately with his proposals on ancient history, and with areas more relevant to the physical sciences.

Velikovsky was a passionate Zionist, and this did steer the focus of his work, although its scope was considerably more far-reaching than this. The entire body of work could be said to stem from an attempt to solve the following problem: that there appeared to be insufficient correlation in the written or archeological records between Jewish history (as recorded in Biblical and other sources) and the history of the adjoining nations (especially Egypt).

Velikovsky searched for common mention of events within literary records, and in the Ipuwer Papyrus, he believed he had found a contemporary Egyptian account of the Israelite Exodus - moreover, he interpreted both accounts as descriptions of a great natural catastrophe.

Velikovsky attempted to investigate the physical cause of the Exodus event, and extrapolated backwards and forwards in history from this point, cross-comparing written and mythical records from cultures on every inhabited continent, using them to attempt synchronisms of the historical records, yielding what he believed to be further periodic natural catastrophes which can be global in scale.

He arrived at a body of radical inter-disciplinary ideas which might be summarized as:

  • Planet Earth has suffered natural catastrophes on a global scale, both before and during mankind's recorded history.
  • There is evidence for these catastrophes in the geological record (here Velikovsky was espousing Catastrophist ideas as opposed to the prevailing Uniformitarian notions) and archeological record. The extinction of many species had occurred catastrophically, not by gradual Darwinian means.
  • The catastrophes which occurred within the memory of mankind are recorded in myths, legends and written history of all ancient cultures and civilisations. Velikovsky pointed to striking concordances in the accounts of many cultures, and proposed that they referred to the same real events, all couched in the individual religious and cultural viewpoints of their authors. He put forward the psychoanalytic idea of "Cultural Amnesia" as a mechanism whereby these literal records came to be regarded as mere myths and legends.
  • The cause of these natural catastrophes were close encounters between the Earth and other bodies with the solar system - not least what were now the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and Mars, these bodies having moved upon different orbits within human memory.
  • To explain the celestial mechanics necessary to permit these changes to the configuration of the solar system, Velikovsky proposed that electromagnetic forces played a much greater role than acknowledged in a purely Newtonian (gravitation-only) model.
  • Velikovsky argued that the conventional chronology of the Near East and classical world, based upon Egyptian Sothic dating and the king lists of Manetho, was wholly flawed. This was the reason for the apparent absence of correlation between the Biblical record and those of neighbouring cultures, and also the cause of the enigmatic "dark ages" in Greece and elsewhere. Velikovsky shifted several chronologies and dynasties from the Egyptian Old Kingdom to Ptolemaic times by centuries (a scheme he called the Revised Chronology), placing the Exodus contemporary with the fall of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. He proposed numerous other synchronisms stretching up to the time of Alexander the Great. He argued that these eliminate phantom "dark ages", and vindicate the biblical accounts of history and those recorded by Herodotus.

Some of Velikovsky's specific postulated catastrophes included:

  • A tentative suggestion that Earth had once been a satellite of a "proto-Saturn" body, before its current Solar orbit.
  • That the Deluge (Noah's Flood) had been caused by proto-Saturn entering a nova state, and ejecting much of its mass into space.
  • A suggestion that the planet Mercury was involved in the Tower of Babel catastrophe.
  • Jupiter had been the culprit for the catastrophe which saw the destruction of the 'Cities of the Plain' (Sodom and Gomorrah)
  • Periodic close contacts with a cometary Venus (which had been ejected from Jupiter) had caused the Exodus events (c.1500 BCE) and Joshua's subsequent "sun standing still" incident.
  • Periodic close contacts with Mars had caused havoc in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE.

As noted above, Velikovsky had conceived the broad sweep of this material by the early 1940s. However, within his lifetime, whilst he continued to research and expand upon the details of his ideas, he released only selected portions of his work to the public in book form:

  • Worlds in Collision (1950) discussed the literary and mythical records of the "Venus" and "Mars" catastrophes

  • portions of his Revised Chronology were published as Ages in Chaos (1952), Peoples of the Sea (1977) and Rameses II & His Time (1978).

  • Earth in Upheaval (1956) dealt with geological evidence for global natural catastrophes.

Several key portions of the Revised Chronology remained unpublished (although the manuscripts are readily available in the Velikovsky Archive and thus the details of the entire scheme are known). Numerous other authors (such as Donovan Courville, Peter James and David Rohl) have since taken a cue from Velikovsky to develop their own proposed chronological revisions.

Velikovsky's ideas on his earlier Saturn/Mercury/Jupiter events were never published, and the available archived manuscripts are much less developed. However the 'Saturnist' theorists have done much subsequent work in this area, proposing that Earth was indeed a satellite of Saturn (a 'brown dwarf' star) before the Holocene period.

Of all the strands of his work, Velikovsky published least on his ideas regarding the role of electromagnetism in astronomy. In fact he retreated from the propositions in his 1946 monograph 'Cosmos without Gravitation', a work he and his supporters preferred to ignore subsequently, and a probable catalyst for the aggressively antipathetic reaction of astronomers and physicists from its first presentation. However other Velikovskian writers such as Ralph Juergens, Earl Milton and Wal Thornhill have embraced and developed these themes to propose a scenario where stars are lit not by internal nuclear fusion, but as the anode focii of galactic-scale electrical discharge currents. These radical ideas are often known as the 'Electric Universe' scenario *. They do not find support in the conventional literature.

The Revised Chronology

Velikovsky's chronological revision contended that the history of the Near East had been inflated by reliance on chronology based on Sothic dating and the Egyptian king-lists of Manetho. He proposed that the 'Dark Ages' of Greece were not real, but artifacts introduced by dating Grecian archeological remains according to the Egyptian scheme. Likewise the apparent unreliability of Herodotus as an historian, and the apparent lack of correlation between Old Testament and Midrashic Jewish history with archeology in Palestine could be thus explained.

Velikovsky anchored the beginning of his revised scheme by synchronising the Ipuwer Papyrus, from the beginning of Egypt's Second Intermediate Period, with the Biblical Exodus. The Ipuwer Papyrus was conventionally dated to approximately 350 years before the conventional date of the Exodus (1450 BCE).

He introduced the concept of alter egos: historical figures who were known by different names in two different sources (e.g. Egyptian and Greek), and were conventionally considered to be entirely different people living in different centuries, but were proposed by Velikovsky to be actually erroneously dated accounts of the same individuals and events. Hatshepsut, the woman pharaoh of Egypt, is identified as the Queen of Sheba who visited Solomon, and Solomon's kingdom is identified as the land of Punt (normally believed to be somewhere in Ethiopia or southern Arabia) to which Hatshepsut led an expedition. Hatshepsut's temple is said to have been modelled on Solomon's. Thutmose III then becomes King Shishak who sacked Jerusalem at the time of Rehoboam. Velikovsky then separated Horemheb and the 19th Dynasty pharaohs from the earlier 18th dynasty pharaohs. Instead, the 22nd through 25th dynasties follow upon the earlier part of the 18th, leading down to the Assyrian invasions of the early 7th century BCE.

It is here that Horemheb and the 19th Dynasty are to be found, and Velikovsky identifies each of the major 19th dynasty pharaohs with a corresponding pharaoh of the 26th. Thus, Rameses I becomes Necho I, Seti I becomes Psamtik I, Rameses II is Necho II, and Merneptah is Apries. In order to make these identifications work, Velikovsky postulates that the Neo-Babylonian kings are actually identical to the Kings of the Hittites, and therefore that Rameses II's battle with the Hittites at Kadesh is identical to Necho's fight against Nebuchadrezzar at Carchemish. Thus Nabopolassar is Mursili II, Neriglissar is Muwatalli, Labashi-Marduk is Urhi-Teshup, and Nebuchadrezzar II is Hattusili III.

Having arrived at the Persian conquest, Velikovsky now has the problem of fitting in Manetho's 20th and 21st dynasties. The 20th dynasty here becomes identified with the dynasties which ruled a newly independent Egypt in the early 4th century BCE, and the Sea Peoples against whom Rameses III fought are now identified as the Greek mercenaries of the Persian Kings (who are here identified with detailed justification as the Peleset, normally seen as another name for the Philistines). The 21st dynasty then becomes a line of priest-kings who ruled simultaneously with the Persians.

Criticism

"…Velikovsky is neither crank nor charlatan—although to state my opinion and to quote one of my colleagues, he is at least gloriously wrong." - Stephen J. Gould Velikovsky in Collision.

Put most concisely, it can be said that Velikovsky's theories have been wholly rejected by mainstream academia, often vociferously. One reason postulated by his followers has been the fact that if Velikovsky's primary theses were indeed correct, the collective preconceptions of a majority of mainstream geological and cosmological science would be negated.

Ironically, some of the concepts Velikovsky originally put forward in the 1940s, which at the time were heretical, are in fact much more widely accepted within the mainstream today. These include:

  • The idea that global mass extinctions were caused by Earth colliding with an extraterrestrial body (particular the anomalous iridium levels at the Cretaceous boundary, which marked the destruction of the dinosaurs).
  • The neo-Darwinist ideas of punctuated equilibrium in evolution.
  • Velikovsky's arguments that electromagnetism must be given greater consideration in astronomy can be seen in the light of the subsequent discoveries such as the Van Allen belts, the sun and planets have extensive magnetospheres, and that the "vacuum of space" was in fact found to be permeated with charged plasma (the so-called "solar wind").
  • The idea that cometary impacts could have precipitated "dark ages" within historical times (eg the AD Dark Ages in Europe)

However mainstream academia contends that their acceptance of such ideas has little or nothing to do with Velikovsky's work, which is generally regarded as erroneous in all its detailed conclusions by academia. Morevover Velikovsky's unorthodox methodology (for example, using comparative mythology to derive scenarios in celestial mechanics) is viewed by most orthodox scholars as an unacceptable way to arrive at conclusions. This view has its origin in the widely held academic opinion that most ancient history can't be trusted for a variety of cultural reasons and that a better basis for understanding ancient events is to extrapolate from the geological record and correct perceived errors in ancient text to fit a priorly conceived theory (i.e. the ancients were too ignorant to know that the heavens don't rain fire).

Criticism of Worlds in Collision

Velikovsky's bestselling and consequently most-criticized book is Worlds in Collision.

Astronomer Harlow Shapley, along with others such as Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, instigated a hostile campaign against the book before it was even published. They were highly critical of publisher Macmillian's initial notion to include it on their text book list. The fundamental criticism against this book from the astronomy community was that its celestial mechanics were irreconcilable with Newtonian celestial mechanics, requiring planetary orbits which could not be made to conform with the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of angular momentum.

Velikovsky tried to protect himself from criticism of his celestial mechanics by removing the original Appendix on the subject from Worlds in Collision, hoping that the merit of his ideas would be evaluated on the basis of his comparative mythology and use of literary sources alone. However this strategy did not protect him: the appendix was an expanded version of the Cosmos Without Gravitation monograph, which he had already distributed to Shapley and others in the late 1940s - and they had regarded the physics within it as egregious.

In the 1960s, some of Velikovsky's specific predictions appeared to be confirmed by space probe findings, for instance:

  • the high surface temperature of Venus.
  • hydrocarbons in the atmosphere of Venus (this was later disproven).
  • Jupiter's generation of radio noises.
However in all such cases, the scientific community did not accept that these successful predictions could be used as proof of Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision scenario, preferring alternative explanations such as a "runaway greenhouse effect" on Venus.

By 1974, the controversy surrounding Velikovsky's work had permeated US society to the point where the American Association for the Advancement of Science felt obliged to address the situation, as they had previously done in relation to UFOs, and devoted a scientific meeting to Velikovsky, featuring (among others) Velikovsky himself and Carl Sagan. Sagan gave a critique of Velikovsky's ideas (the book version of Sagan's critique is much longer than that presented in the talk, see below). His criticisms are available in an essay in the book Reflections on the Romance of Science. Sagan's arguments were popular in nature and he did not remain to debate Velikovsky in person, facts that were used by Velikovsky's followers to discredit his analysis (see Ginenthal in References below). Sagan rebutted these charges, and further attacked Velikovsky's ideas in his PBS television series A Personal Voyage.

It was not until the 1980s that a very detailed critique of Worlds in Collision was made in terms of its use of mythical and literary sources, when Bob Forrest published a highly critical examination of them (see below).

A short analysis of the position of arguments in the late 20th century is given by Dr Velikovsky's ex-associate, and Kronos editor, C. Leroy Ellenberger, in his A Lesson from Velikovsky.

More recently, the absence of supporting material in ice-core studies (such as the Greenland Dye-3 and Vostok cores) is claimed to have removed any basis for the proposition of a global catastrophe of the proposed dimension within the later Holocene period.

Criticism of the Revised Chronology

Velikovsky's "Revised chronology" has been rejected by nearly all mainstream historians and Egyptologists. It was claimed that Velikovsky's usage of material for proof is often very selective.

In 1965 the leading cuneiformist Abraham Sachs, in a forum at Brown University, dismissed Velikovsky's use of Mesopotamian cuneiform sources. Velikovsky was never able to refute Sachs' attack.

In 1978, following the much-postponed publication of further volumes in Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos series, the UK's Society for Interdisciplinary Studies organised a conference in Glasgow specifically to debate the revised chronology. The ultimate conclusion of this work, by names including Peter James, Jon Bimson, Geoffrey Gammonn, and David Rohl, was that the Revised Chronology was untenable. Specifically, Michael Jones contended that it was impossible to separate the 18th, 19th and 20th Dynasties by centuries as Velikovsky proposed, presenting evidence from genealogies of construction workers which spanned the three dynasties contiguously.

However, inspired by Velikovky's original premise that the Manethian chronology of Egypt was flawed, James, Rohl and several other authors have gone on to publish their more conservative chronological revisions.

"The Velikovsky Affair"

Such was the hostility directed against Velikovsky from some quarters (particularly the original campaign led by Harlow Shapley), that over the years numerous commentators have made an analysis of the furor in itself.

The most prominent of these was a study by American Behavioral Scientist magazine, eventually published in book form as The Velikovsky Affair.

Some historians of science have found the events to be an illuminating example of how 20th century science dealt with new paradigms, and how members of particular academic disciplines reacted to ideas from workers from outside their field, illustrating an aversion to permitting people to cross inter-disciplinary boundaries.

The scientific press generally refused to permit Velikovsky a forum to rebut his critics. On occasions where astronomers did agree to printed debate in popular periodicals (most notably Prof. John Q. Stewart of Princeton University in Harper's Magazine, June 1951, and Prof Lloyd Motz of Columbia University in Yale Scientific Magazine, April 1967), Velikovsky's legal training, skill as a debater and polymath knowledge of the humanities generally left lay audiences with the impression that he'd left the astronomers floundering. Naturally, whilst never conceding for a minute that he was correct in his ideas, the scientific community found Velikovsky's rhetorical skill at swaying public opinion exasperating.

The storm of controversy created by Velikovsky's publications may have helped revive the catastrophist movement in the second half of the 20th century; however it is also held by some working in the field that progress has actually been retarded by the negative aspects of the so-called Velikovsky Affair. Works with similar themes, such as those of de Santillana and von Dechend, Allan and Delair, and Clube and Napier (see References below), have met in part with an academic tolerance never experienced by Velikovsky himself, and even with acclaim by critics of the originals.

Books by Velikovsky

All published by Doubleday:

References

  • Allan, D.S. and J.B. Delair (1995). When The Earth Nearly Died. Gateway Books, UK. published in USA as Cataclysm by Bear & Co, 1997. A précis is here.
  • Bauer, Henry H. (1984). Beyond Velikovsky. The History of a Public Controversy. University of Illinois, Urbana.

  • Robert Todd Carroll (2003). The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-27242-6. Pages 396-401.

  • Clube, V. and Bill Napier (1982). The Cosmic Serpent. Universe Books, New York.

  • Clube, V. and Bill Napier (1990). The Cosmic Winter. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

  • de Grazia, Alfred, Juergens R.E., Stecchini L.C. (Eds.) (1978). The Velikovsky Affair - Scientism versus Science. 2ed., Metron Publications, Princeton, New Jersey. Also online.

  • de Santillana, Giorgio and Hertha Von Dechend (1977). Hamlet's Mill: an Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time. Godine, Boston.

  • Forrest, Bob (1981). Velikovsky's Sources. In six volumes, with Notes and Index Volume. Privately published by the author, Manchester.

  • Forrest, Robert (1983). Venus and Velikovsky: The Original Sources, Skeptical Inquirer, Vol 8, #2, Winter 1983-84, 154-164.

  • Ginenthal, Charles (1995). Carl Sagan & Immanuel Velikovsky. New Falcon Publications, Tempe Arizona

  • Miller, Alica (1977). Index to the Works of Immanuel Velikovsky. Glassboro State College, Glassboro.

  • Payne-Gaposchkin, Cecilia (1952). Worlds in Collision, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol 96, Oct. 15, 1952.

  • Pearlman, Dale, (Ed.) (1996) Stephen J. Gould and Immanuel Velikovsky. Ivy Press Books, Forest Hills, N.Y.

  • PENSÉE. 1972-1975. Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered. I - X. Student Academic Freedon Forum, Portland.

  • Ransom, C.J. (1976) The Age of Velikovsky. Delta, New York.

  • Philip Plait (2002). Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax", John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-40976-6. Chapter 18.

  • Rohl, David (1996) A Test of Time. Arrow Books.

  • Talbott, Stephen L. (1977) Velikovsky Reconsidered. Warner Books, New York.

External links

Velikovsky works available online

Critiques of Velikovsky

Organisations sympathetic to Velikovsky's work:

1895 births | 1979 deaths | Belarusian people | Pseudohistory | Pseudoscience | Pseudoscientists

Immanuel Velikovsky | Immanuel Velikovsky | עמנואל וליקובסקי | Великовский, Иммануил

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Immanuel Velikovsky".

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