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The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe, by Michael D. Gordin
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Properly analyzed, the collective mythological and religious writings of humanity reveal that around 1500 BC, a comet swept perilously close to Earth, triggering widespread natural disasters and threatening the destruction of all life before settling into solar orbit as Venus, our nearest planetary neighbor. Sound implausible? Well, from 1950 until the late 1970s, a huge number of people begged to differ, as they devoured Immanuel Velikovsky’s major best-seller, Worlds in Collision, insisting that perhaps this polymathic thinker held the key to a new science and a new history. Scientists, on the other hand, assaulted Velikovsky’s book, his followers, and his press mercilessly from the get-go. In The Pseudoscience Wars, Michael D. Gordin resurrects the largely forgotten figure of Velikovsky and uses his strange career and surprisingly influential writings to explore the changing definitions of the line that separates legitimate scientific inquiry from what is deemed bunk, and to show how vital this question remains to us today. Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished material from Velikovsky’s personal archives, Gordin presents a behind-the-scenes history of the writer’s career, from his initial burst of success through his growing influence on the counterculture, heated public battles with such luminaries as Carl Sagan, and eventual eclipse. Along the way, he offers fascinating glimpses into the histories and effects of other fringe doctrines, including creationism, Lysenkoism, parapsychology, and more—all of which have surprising connections to Velikovsky’s theories. Science today is hardly universally secure, and scientists seem themselves beset by critics, denialists, and those they label “pseudoscientists”—as seen all too clearly in battles over evolution and climate change. The Pseudoscience Wars simultaneously reveals the surprising Cold War roots of our contemporary dilemma and points readers to a different approach to drawing the line between knowledge and nonsense.
- Sales Rank: #1320879 in Books
- Published on: 2012-09-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.30" w x 6.00" l, 1.20 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 304 pages
Review
"What is the difference between science and pseudoscience? As the publisher of Skeptic magazine and the 'Skeptic columnist for Scientific American I am frequently asked this question. Believe it or not, it'a a hard question to answer. Michael Gordin's The Pseudoscience Wars is the best single volume I have come across in my vast reading on the topic. He clearly and succinctly captures all sides on the debate, is rigorous in his research and fair to both believers and skeptics, and his narrative reconstruction of the Velikovsky affair makes for gripping reading. The Pseudoscience Wars is destined to become a classic in science literature."
(Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist for Scientific American , author of The Believing Brain)
“Few issues loom more important today than the boundaries and authority of scientific expertise. How do the boundaries get created and reinforced, and what work do terms like ‘pseudoscience’ do in the debates? By delving deep into one of the earliest border skirmishes of the modern age—the fascinating, beguiling case of Immanuel Velikovsky, his heterodox theories of human history and cosmic evolution, and the firestorm of protest they elicited from the scientific community—Michael Gordin offers us a roadmap of the modern fringe. Scouring extraordinary sources with his keen analytic eye, Gordin reveals the roots of today's pseudoscience wars. Engrossing and illuminating.”
(David Kaiser, author of How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival)
"Gordin . . . is remarkably evenhanded. . . . This won't put an end to the debates that rage between legitimate scientific research and other fringe doctrines, but it does lay the Velikovsky affair to rest with fairness and clarity and will help to put into perspective many of the controversies swirling around today's scientific landscape. A good read for those interested in the history of science or pseudoscientific theories."
(Library Journal)
“Those who are interested in how bad ideas start, how they diffuse, how they covet and resist confrontation, and how they wax and wane in popularity over time will find much food for thought in this gripping book.”
(Science)
"Scholarly and highly readable. . . . Gordin's historical analysis of pseudoscience remains disturbingly relevant." (Nature)
"A slyly funny writer. . . . Make no mistake: Gordin's sympathies are not with the occult. His fascination with pseudoscience is more like a negative method: the experts define the boundaries of their domain by fending off the quacks. For Gordin, pseudoscience is an instrument by which he takes the temperature of the past. . . . . The Pseudoscience Wars is a relatively slim volume, but Gordin siphons into it an overwhelming amount of information." (New Republic)
About the Author
Michael D. Gordin is professor of history at Princeton University and the author of a number of books, including Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Most helpful customer reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Important book putting the affair into a cultural perspective
By J. Hundley
Not unlike a couple of others here, I came into this book, based upon the title and subtitle, expecting something a bit different. What I got is soemthing better. This is not a rehash of Velikovsky's ideas and the debunking or promotion of them, but rather a serious, widely-researched attempt to place the whole "Velikovsky Affair" into an historical and social perspective.
Expressing no overt opinion of IV's ideas or the speculations behind them, Gordin instead places them in their contemporary setting and examines how and why they provoked the types of responses they did. He presents only a thumbnail biographical sketch of IV, focusing on his background and the events of his life only as they pertain to the development of his ideas and how they color his (IV's) reactions to the reactions his books produced. He then follows how those reactions changed over time, both within and without established, academic science and the larger world.
Gordin uses Velikovsky as a template of a sort for the reception of, and reaction to, other ideas and ideologies that have arisen in the past 60 or so years and shows how Velikovsky's supporters and critics have influenced the examination of those other ideas. This is really a fascinating read.
And it is also a very good read. Gordin's writing is scholarly without being at all obscure and his straightforward, matter-of-fact prose serves his purpose here very well. His subject is interesting and engaging; his style doesn't have to be.
This is, I think, an important book for those interested in the history and culture of science in specific, and ideas in general, particularly in the ways that serious academics act and react to popular and populist ideas that claim to contradict or attack their work. Highly recommended here.
25 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
Velikovsky: Scientist or fantasist?
By SInohey
This is one of a few books that give Velikovsky a fair shake. Although not a supporter of Velikovsky's theories, Professor Gordin treats his subject with the evenhanded analysis of a dispassionate science historian. The out-of-this-world (literally and figuratively) theories of Velikovsky - about the cosmos, formation of the planet, electromagnetic celestial mechanics and the effects of planetary genesis and orbits on human history, as described in many various ancient myths - are expressed in the book without derisive criticism.
Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) was a Russian born Jewish psychiatrist who established a practice of psychiatry and Freudian psychoanalysis in Palestine from 1924 to 1939. He published several papers in medical journals, in which he was first to suggest that specific changes in EEG (electroencephalogram) were diagnostic of epilepsy.
Although an admirer of Freud, Velikovsky set out to disprove the latter's claim, that Moses was a follower of the Pharaoh Akhenaton or Pharaoh himself, as Freud suggested in "Moses and Monotheism". Velikovsky postulated the theory that Akhenaten was the model for Oedipus in Greek mythology. This began a second career of research and writings in archeology, biblical investigation, and cosmology in which Velikovsky tried to change the accepted chronology of ancient Egyptian kings and dynasties by interpreting or misinterpreting ancient documents (Eg: the Ipuwer papyrus, Mesopotamian cuneiforms etc).
In 1939, Velikovsky travelled to New York, ostensibly to do research for his planned book "Oedipus and Akhenaton" but remained permanently in the USA after the WW ll broke out. He eventually ended up in Princeton, New Jersey, where he became acquainted with Albert Einstein with whom he authored a two volume scientific treatise "Scripta Universitatis Atque Bibliothecae Hierosolymitanum" that became a foundation for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Velikovsky's early work gave him credence in the scientific community but when he drifted to the far reaches of accepted dogma he was ostracized by most main stream scientists. This began with his pamphlets "Cosmos without Gravitation" and "Theses for the reconstruction of ancient history" that he self-published in 1945 and distributed to universities and scientists. His 1950 opus the "Worlds in Collision" placed him irretrievably in the "catastrophists" camp. Einstein distanced himself from Velikovsky and Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley mounted a campaign to prevent publication of the book by the academic press. It was eventually published by Double Day and became a national best seller. This was followed by "Ages in Chaos" (1952) and "Earth in Upheaval"(1955), "Peoples of the Sea" (1977), "Rameses ll and his time" (1978) and "Grave diggers and Star gazers" published humorously (1983).
Astrophysicist Carl Sagan (1934-1996) criticized Velikovsky in his book "Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science (1977) and debunked pseudo-science in his best seller "The Demon-Haunted world" which he co-authored with Ann Druyan in 1997.
Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), the brilliant scientist polymath said it best : "Velikovsky is neither a crank nor charlatan...he is at least gloriously wrong.... Velikovsky would rebuild the science of celestial mechanics to save the literal accuracy of ancient legends" (paraphrased).
Gordin writes:"The more successful science becomes, the more outsiders will want to participate in the process" and explains the concept of the "demarcation problem" in science (Karl Popper 1920) "Scientists will always demarcate, beause part of what science is..is an exclusion of some domains as irrelevant, rejected, outdated or incorrect".
The danger of pseudo-science, as expounded by fringe so-called scholars and some established academics, is the negative effect it has on the credulity of the non-scientifically educated majority of the population and its impact on society and its future viz. "Lysenkoinism, creationism, flood geology, global warming denial etc.."
However, we should be careful not to reject new ideas or theories simply because they challenge the status quo. Velikovsky's entire body of work should not be dismissed off-hand because many of his ideas contradict physical and geological realities; presently serious work is being conducted into revising the chronology of the dynasties and pharaohs and so-called "dark period" of the ancient cultures. Throwing the baby with the water is contradictory to investigative science - a good primer on the subject is Thomas Kuhn's "The structure of Scientific Revolutions".
The debate continues to this day as shown by the arguments of Ellenberger (erstwhile disciple and now critic of Velikovsky) and Greenberg (friend, defender and supporter of Velikovsky and his ideas) in the "Comments" section of the reviews.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
A fascinating look at demarcation "in practice"
By Daniel Hicks
I'm a philosopher of science, and I read this book with the History and Philosophy of Science Reading Group at the University of Notre Dame in Spring 2013. My assessment of the book is thoroughly positive, and I believe most of the other participants would agree. It is an engaging and fascinating narrative, easy to read through for pleasure, but still having enough depth and scholarly engagement for hard-nosed academics. I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone who enjoys reading about science (and its counterpart, pseudoscience).
Philosophically, Gordin's book is extremely interesting for its approach to (what we philosophers call) the "demarcation problem." How do you distinguish -- demarcate -- that activity we call science from non-scientific pretenders? Common examples in the second category include alchemy, astrology, phrenology (studying the shape of skulls), creation science, and science under the Nazi regime and Lysenko in the Soviet Union. More controversial or difficult cases include Freudian psychology, Marxism, and evolution by natural selection ("Darwinism").
A classic attempted solution to this problem is from the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper. Popper said that "falsifiability" was the crucial feature: If your hypothesis makes predictions that can be empirically refuted, then (and only then) is it science. Even today, scientists offer this solution when creation science (and intelligent design, a descendent better adapted to our regulatory environment) rears its head. But contemporary philosophers of science generally agree that refutation isn't as clear-cut as Poppers solution assumes. You might remember an announcement from some European scientists in the summer of 2011 that they had measured some neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. But Einstein's theories of relativity are built on the assumption that the speed of light is absolute -- nothing can travel faster. So Einstein would seem to have been refuted. Actually, no: the community of physicists poured over the data and experimental setup, eventually concluding that there were errors in the calculation. In other words, Einstein's theories were protected from empirical refutation, at least in this case. By Popper's lights, this would have made these theories unfalsifiable, and hence pseudoscience. But of course they're not pseudoscience. Popper's criterion won't work; it's simply too simple.
Since recognizing this problem, other philosophers have attempted to develop other solutions. All have been found wanting. Gordin is quite clear from the outset that he doesn't think these efforts will succeed. So if we want to understand how science and pseudoscience are separate, we need to look at the ways that scientists themselves socially marginalize pseudoscientists: writing critical essays, keeping their books from being published, excluding them from conferences, firing their supporters, and so on. Gordin's primary narrative deals with Imanuel Velikovsky, a psychoanalyst who argued -- among many outlandish things -- that Venus was a comet from Jupiter that had nearly collided with the Earth, and that this explained many of the supernatural-sounding events of Exodus. Gordin also incorporates side-narratives, presenting other pseudosciences as similar cases, such as Lysenkoism, eugenics, and Young-Earth creationism.
The result, overall, is an engaging tour of the margins of twentieth century science, with enough scholarly substance to keep a roomful of philosophers and historians busy for several weeks. Gordin's book has my highest recommendation for both popular and academic readers.
Edit 2013-03-10: Fixed a typo pointed out by an astute reader.
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