Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [72]
To the best of my knowledge, in Worlds in Collision there is not a single correct astronomical prediction made with sufficient precision for it to be more than a vague lucky guess—and there are, as I have tried to point out, a host of demonstrably false claims. The existence of strong radio emission from Jupiter is sometimes pointed to as the most striking example of a correct prediction by Velikovsky, but all objects give off radio waves if they are at temperatures above absolute zero. The essential characteristics of the Jovian radio emission—that it is nonthermal, polarized, intermittent radiation, connected with the vast belts of charged particles which surround Jupiter, trapped by its strong magnetic field—are nowhere predicted by Velikovsky. Further, his “prediction” is clearly not linked in its essentials to the fundamental Velikovskian theses.
Merely guessing something right does not necessarily demonstrate prior knowledge or a correct theory. For example, in an early science-fiction work dated 1949, Max Ehrlich imagined a near-collision of the Earth with another cosmic object, which filled the sky and terrorized the inhabitants of the Earth. Most frightening was the fact that on this passing planet was a natural feature which looked very much like a huge eye. This is one of many fictional and serious antecedents to Velikovsky’s idea that such collisions happen frequently. But that is not my point. In a discussion of how it is that the side of the Moon facing the Earth has large smooth maria while the averted face of the Moon is almost free of them, John Wood of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory proposed that the side of the Moon now turned toward the Earth was once at the edge, or limb, of the Moon, on the leading hemisphere of the Moon’s motion about the Earth. In this position it swept up, billions of years ago, a ring of debris which surrounded the Earth and which may have been involved in the formation of the Earth-Moon system. By Euler’s laws, the Moon must then have altered its rotation axis to correspond to its new principal moment of inertia, so that its leading hemisphere then faced the Earth. The remarkable conclusion is that there would have been a time, according to Wood, when what is now the eastern limb of the Moon would have been facing the Earth. But the eastern limb of the Moon has an enormous collision feature, billions of years old, called Mare Orientale, which looks very much like a giant eye. No one has suggested that Ehrlich was relying upon a racial memory of an event three billion years old when he wrote The Big Eye. It is merely a coincidence. When enough fiction is written and enough scientific hypotheses are proposed, sooner or later there will be accidental concordances.
With these enormous liabilities, how is it that Worlds in Collision has been so popular? Here I can only guess. For one thing, it is an attempted validation of religion. The old Biblical stories are literally true, Velikovsky tells us, if only we interpret them in the right way. The Jewish people, for example, saved from Egyptian Pharaohs, Assyrian kings and innumerable other disasters by obliging cometary intervention, had every right, he seems to be saying, to believe themselves chosen. Velikovsky attempts to rescue not only religion but also astrology: the outcomes of wars, the fates of whole peoples, are determined by the positions of the planets. In some sense, his work holds out a promise of the cosmic connectedness of mankind—a sentiment with which I sympathize, but in a somewhat different context (The Cosmic Connection)—and the reassurance that ancient peoples and other cultures were not so very dumb, after all.
The outrage that seems to have seized many otherwise placid scientists upon colliding