The Search for the Missing Amazon Meteor

space.com ^ | 9/25/2002 | diana jong

[SteveH]

You're welcome. It plays into my idea of things, I'm a catastrophist

Yes, things have come a long way since Worlds in Collision, haven't they :-)?

[blam]

"Yes, things have come a long way since Worlds in Collision, haven't they :-)?"

Yup. Velikovsky got a lot of things right but, about an equal amount wrong. His biggest problem was that he tried to explain everything.

[Domestic Church]

3195BC, 2254BC, 1628BC, 1159BC and 540AD. (Pick one)

Okay, So you think one was Santorini blowing it's lid, how about the others? Any more volcanoes ? Any craters tied into these dates? Seems like perhaps a few should be...isn't there a big one in Iraq?

[Bernard Marx]

Bump for later.

[SteveH]

Yup. Velikovsky got a lot of things right but, about an equal amount wrong. His biggest problem was that he tried to explain everything.

In scientific and technical endeavors, generally speaking, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. With Velikovsky, his ideas were so radical for the time that he he had practically no one's shoulders to stand on, and had to drag himself out of the contemporary scientific thinking of the day, and then gain attention for his ideas-- which he eventually did.

So I could understand if he committed an occasional eccentricity or two. The important thing, to my thinking, is that (IMHO) he got the ball rolling in the area of catastrophe theory, which eventually led to more mundane scientists (eg LBL's Luis Alvarez wrt Chicxulub) committing to investigating and ultimately legitimizing selected hypotheses inspired by and/or based on the general thrust of his arguments.

[blam]

"how about the others? Any more volcanoes ? "

The ice cores have recorded an acid layer (volcano) on all the dates listed except 540AD. Baily, Baillie, Clube and Napier think/suspect that 540AD was a comet/asteroid, the beginning of the Dark Ages.

[blam]

"In scientific and technical endeavors, generally speaking, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. With Velikovsky, his ideas were so radical for the time that he he had practically no one's shoulders to stand on, and had to drag himself out of the contemporary scientific thinking of the day, and then gain attention for his ideas-- which he eventually did. "

I absolutely agree 100%.

[blam]

Disaster That Struck The Ancients

Iraq Crater.

[Calvin Locke]

...wanted $1 million before they would let the NASA ...

Since this is from the Goddard Space Flight Center, they have to store GoreSat at a cost of $1M/year. Remove the
useful/classified stuff, and give Gore's Satellite to them. I just saved the American Taxpayer a megabuck/year and the
those aborigines can truthfully claim to be in the Space Age before all the neighboring tribes.

[newcats]

the beginning of the Dark Ages.

The Dark Ages? What were those?
If you are talking about pre-renasaince (?) Europe, you have your dates all wrong.

[newcats]

Belay that last comment.....
But my point was that the term "Dark Ages" had nothing to do with light.
The Dark Ages were brought on by the downfall of the Roman Empire and subsequent loss of a centralized power base.

[FourtySeven]

hehe....I was rather suprised to see that blam wasn't part of this one too...no offense Steve... ;)

[aruanan]

It'll be interesting to see how many other similarly-aged impact craters turn up in other parts of the world.

[blam]

"But my point was that the term "Dark Ages" had nothing to do with light."

Think Again.

The Dark Ages: Were They Darker Than We Imagined?

[blam]

"It'll be interesting to see how many other similarly-aged impact craters turn up in other parts of the world. "

Check This out.

[SteveH]

It has been so long since I actually read Velikovsky... the first and only time (all of his books) ... I also have to agree with you that his batting average was not as high as one would prefer, and he played fast and loose with some of the conclusions... Still, don't they say (loose paraphrase, forgot the exact wording) that one of the hardest parts of science is knowing which questions to ask? In my thinking, Velikovsky was at least asking the right questions, and (imho) spawned a whole new generation of thinking in several disciplines. In the timeframe of the 1950's (!! of all eras, for goodness sakes !!) that must have taken an unimaginable amount of guts. (And like Gantenbrink and his pyramid shaft door discoveries, he gets shunted aside when the credits roll. Wrong pedigree, dontcha know :-)

[dljordan]

ok, so it's an alien open-pit mine.

[blam]

Another of my favorites, George Carter, suffered a similar fate. He wrote the book, Earlier Than You Think

[bert]

...Velikovsky got a lot of things right...

Ahaa! Velikovski!

Brain pain as I reorder the snapses to dredge up the facts.

As I recall Velikovski wrote a book including references to the Egyptian dynastic time line and thought there was an error of 620 years when compared with similar Biblical time lines. I don't remember the name of the book but it was clearly labeled Volume 1. The library did not have volume 2.I bugged the librarian to get volume 2 by interlibrary loan and she searched mightily but was told by more than one of her collegues there is no volume 2.

have you any info on the subject?

Sorry to bother you, but this is the first opportunity I have ever had to discuss the subject with any one who had any knowledge whatsoever of the man, and it is afterall, Friday afternoon..

[SteveH]

No es un problema :-).