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From: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: Re: Gravity/ reply to Pam Pincha
Message-ID: <180@gargoyle.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 10-Sep-85 15:32:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.180
Posted: Tue Sep 10 15:32:03 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Sep-85 07:33:03 EDT
References: <389@imsvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Organization: U. of Chicago, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 90

Pam Pincha writes:

> Point 3 - No ancient calendar having more than 360 days. Please!
> Look up the Olmec calendar(which later became the Mayan calendar)
> for accurate calendars. They not only had 365 days they had
> compensations for all leap year contingencies. Their calendar
> rivals ours (and is in some ways better) for accuracy! What are
> you trying to prove with that statement?

Ted Holden replies:

> This one is actually very simple.  Calendars designed after the last
> global catastrophy tend to be 365 days, those designed before it were
> 360.  There was an intermediate period when most antique nations had
> a 360 day calendar with five non-days or festival days at the end of
> each year.

Since the word "catastrophe" is central to your theory, Ted, you may
as well learn to spell it.

What is the evidence, Ted, for your assertions above about ancient
calendars?  Or is the burden of proof always on those who disagree
with you?

Here is a sample of the quality of Velikovsky's reasoning about
ancient calendars.  In *Worlds in Collision*, V. writes:

   The story of the Flood, as given in Genesis, reckons in months
   of thirty days; it says that 150 days passed between the 17th 
   day of the 2nd month and the 17th day of the 7th month....

Hmmm, maybe Velikovsky is right!  But wait a minute:  there are also
150 days between February 17 and July 17 according to the modern
365-day calendar (except in leap years).  So we can't conclude from
this alone that the author of Genesis reckoned in 30-day months.  In
a footnote in *Worlds in Collision*, V. says:

   The other variant of the story of the Flood ... has the Deluge
   lasting 40 days instead of 150.

V. gives no evidence that the 150-day story is more reliable than the
40-day story, or that either of them is a factual account.  He uses
whatever fits his own scheme and dismisses everything else.

In a supplementary section to *Earth in Upheaval*, Velikovsky,
discussing Greek history, explains why it is "actually very simple."
He says that there were no Greek Dark Ages (between Mycenaean and
Archaic Greece) because "a literate people cannot forfeit completely
a well-developed literacy..."  Silly historians, to have overlooked
such an elementary point.  Anyway, since I am studying ancient Greek
history, I am looking forward to Ted's explanation of why I need to
revise radically my ideas about this historical period.

V.'s standard procedure in any field is to construct his theory and
then to challenge anyone to disprove it, as if the burden of proof
lay on those who disagree with him.  This relieves him of the
necessity of refuting the careful work of generations of scholars who
have constructed a chronology for the ancient Middle East, or of
showing in detail the inadequacy of conventional physics and
astronomy.  The historian Henry Bauer (in *Beyond Velikovsky*)
summarizes the case for applying the term "crank" to Velikovsky:

  He does not accept the methodologies of the fields about which he
  writes; in at least some, he displays a considerable ignorance, of
  which he remains unaware.  He does not accept the onus of proof, but
  makes his assertions and insists that they be accepted unless they
  can be proved wrong to his satisfaction.  He is convinced that his
  work is of signal importance, with ramifications in all areas of
  thought, and in those areas he rejects accepted views and proclaims
  his own.  He is a universal scholar, a polymath, surrounded by
  misguided specialists; he corrects them on technical details even in
  their own specialties.  So very impoprtant is all this that any
  humor, any lighter touch, is quite out of place; after all, he walks
  in the company of Maxwell, Roentgen, Bruno, Einstein, and the rest.
  Even criticism of quite minor points in his scheme is unacceptable;
  his view must always prevail.  He sees himself as calmly objective
  when in fact he indulges in polemic and counterpolemic, is quite
  subjective in his judgments, and from the beginning presents himself
  aggressively (as well as grandiloquently) as a heretic.  He demands
  credence for work that he has not yet published.  Opposition is a
  mark of conspiracy against him.  Every discovery and every public
  controversy that bear at all on any of his views are seen only in
  that light:  intellectual activity consists of a struggle between
  Velikovskian and anti-Velikovskian ideas, even when no one but
  himself has brought his name into the matter.  The views of the
  conventional scholars are based on dogma, whereas he has deduced the
  truth empirically, *ab initio*, from facts and phenomena [or so he
  believes].
    
Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes