Re: Colbert & Ostrom Talk (fwd)

[ornstn@inforamp.net (Ronald Orenstein)]

>> what? Velikovsky is out to lunch in *both* fields!
>
>Just curious, which astronomers and historians have been known 
>to say that? That deserves some references. (And no one that has 
>done valid scientific work deserves a comparison with Velikovsky, 
>ok Hoyle probably behaved like what someone called a 'paleomoron', 
>but Velikovsky? I'm still having problems with his huge group of
>fanatics, if any of them knows is being compared to Hoyle... they always 
>come up with the Wegener example.)

The book you want is "Scientists Confront Velikovsky", edited by Donald
Goldsmith (WW Norton, 1977).  The book contains essays by Norman Storer, a
sociologist; JD Mulholland, an astronomer; Peter Huber, a statistician;
David Morrison, a NASA astronomer; and one Carl Sagan.  Isaac Asimov
contributes a valuable forward, "The role of the heretic", which makes a
nice division between heretics within a discipline (endoheretics) like, I
suppose, Bakker, and heretics coming in from outside the discipline like
Velikovsky (or, in the present case, Hoyle) (exoheretics).  He concludes in
part:

"Public support or no, the exoheretic virtually never proves to be right.
(How can he be right when he, quite literally, doesn't know what he's
talking about?)  Of course he may prove to have said something somewhere in
his flood of words that bears some resemblance to something that later
proves to be so, and this coincidental occurrence of word and fact may be
hailed by his followers of proving all the rest of the corpus of his work.
This outcome, however, has only cultic value."

Of course Asimov makes one goof - he claims that the endoheretic differs
from the exoheretic in that he is usually greeted with public disinterest
and rarely profits financially from his heresy.  I will leave others on this
list to suggest that Bakker may be an exception....

--
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