Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!sethg From: sethg@athena.mit.edu (Seth A. Gordon) Newsgroups: sci.misc Subject: Re: Omni-Americans Message-ID: <3592@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> Date: 9 Mar 88 19:54:21 GMT References: <5017@uwmcsd1.UUCP> <2790@gryphon.CTS.COM> <1221@uop.edu> <5143@uwmcsd1.UUCP> Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Reply-To: sethg@athena.mit.edu (Seth A. Gordon) Followup-To: talk.origins Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lines: 95 In article <5143@uwmcsd1.UUCP> markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins) writes: > [a heck of a lot...] > > (5) In the early '50's the best selling work "Worlds In Collision" was > banned... Pardon? I thought the First Amendment prohibited that sort of behavior, even in the early '50s. (Was it banned because Velikovsky was a Communist? Improbable...) > ...by hard-nosed astronomers who knew nothing about what the > book was talking about, by their own admission. WIC was, if I'm not mistaken, a book about astronomy. Are you saying it was banned by astronomers who knew nothing about astronomy? > ...Yet they chose > to initiate a slur campaign, solely because the man (Velikovsky) > threatened the paradign of Gradualism and because he dared to > question the Universal validity of Newton's law of gravity.... Did he have any evidence, based on contemporary experiments, that Newton's law was not universal? > Never mind whether his hypothesis (or paradigm) was tenable or > not. It did not matter.... Carl Sagan, in _Broca's Brain,_ has a chapter on Velikovsky's book, with an appendix on the physics behind it. In the appendix, he says that the probability of some of the planetary maneuvers V. describes are so unlikely that the book should have been titled _Worlds In Collusion._ > Never mind that the very same kind of hypothesis has been > invoked to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs. The dinosaur-extinction hypothesis, as I understand it, is that dust raised by a large meteorite striking the earth caused climactic changes that the dinosaurs couldn't survive. Velikovsky's hypothesis, at least as Sagan tells it, is that thousands of years ago, a piece of the planet Jupiter was ejected into space, flew toward the Earth, and, through the influence of its gravitational force, parted the Red Sea so Moses could cross, stopped and restarted the Earth's rotation at the appropriate biblical points, did lots of other things I have neither memory nor space to recount, and then settled into a stable orbit as the planet Venus. Is that "the very same kind of hypothesis?" Not in my book. I have directed followups to talk.origins because that forum seems most appropriate for Velikovskia. > Specialization is wrong, and also unnecessary. People just have to learn > to learn more efficiently to overcome the so-called information > explosion (which is really a communication breakdown.) How? I'd like to know. Send a copy to Paul Gray, president of MIT, and the MIT Provost's Office; I'm sure they'd like to know, too. > Science is filled with bullshit detectors that have not used adequately > on themselves. Not surprising. Scientists are human. > > [re an immutable, objective, outside reality] >(1) It might not be there, >(2) It does not NEED to be there, because we are doing just fine as it is. It MIGHT AS WELL be there, because we are doing just fine assuming it is. That sort of assumption led to the technology that this discussion is being conducted with. Imagine it the other way: "Well, Joe, this particular set of chemicals isn't a semiconductor now, but I'm sure if I just BELIEVE it is for long enough, it will BECOME a semiconductor. And if I BELIEVE for a little longer, it will turn into a Cray supercomputer." > If our opinion changes, then so does reality. At one time, it was the opinion of a vast number of researchers in the Soviet Union, led by one Mr. Lysenko, that genetics was wrong and that organisms were *entirely* a product of their environment. Soviet researchers who disagreed lost their jobs, sometimes their lives. Joe Stalin made sure that the *opinion* of the Soviet scientific community was in line with Lysenko's. Reality didn't change. Reality won. Genetics is now accepted even in the Soviet Union. -- sethg%athena.MIT.EDU@mit-eddie.UUCP -- CONVERT me, CONTRA lovers! -- sethg%athena.MIT.EDU@mitvma.BITNET| talk.politics.latin-america: YES 22 / NO 3 sethg@athena.MIT.EDU -------------| I need **81** more YES votes by March 31.