Worlds in Collision - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Worlds in Collision is a book written by Immanuel Velikovsky

Immanuel Velikovsky

Immanuel Velikovsky was a Russian-born American independent scholar of Jewish origins, best known as the author of a number of controversial books reinterpreting the events of ancient history, in particular the US bestseller Worlds in Collision, published in 1950...

and first published on April 3, 1950. The book proposed that around the 15th century BCE

Common Era

Common Era ,abbreviated as CE, is an alternative designation for the calendar era originally introduced by Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century, traditionally identified with Anno Domini .Dates before the year 1 CE are indicated by the usage of BCE, short for Before the Common Era Common Era...

, Venus

Venus

Venus is the second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. After the Moon, it is the brightest natural object in the night sky, reaching an apparent magnitude of −4.6, bright enough to cast shadows...

was ejected from Jupiter

Jupiter

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet within the Solar System. It is a gas giant with mass one-thousandth that of the Sun but is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in our Solar System combined. Jupiter is classified as a gas giant along with Saturn,...

as a comet

Comet

A comet is an icy small Solar System body that, when close enough to the Sun, displays a visible coma and sometimes also a tail. These phenomena are both due to the effects of solar radiation and the solar wind upon the nucleus of the comet...

or comet-like object, and passed near Earth

Earth

Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

(an actual collision is not mentioned). The object changed Earth's orbit and axis, causing innumerable catastrophes which were mentioned in early mythologies

Mythology

The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...

and religions around the world. It was met with a very hostile reception by the scientific community at the time of publication, and has since been proven incorrect.

Publication

The book was first published on April 3, 1950, by Macmillan Publishers

Macmillan Publishers

Macmillan Publishers Ltd, also known as The Macmillan Group, is a privately held international publishing company owned by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. It has offices in 41 countries worldwide and operates in more than thirty others.-History:...

. Macmillan's interest in publishing it was encouraged by the knowledge that Velikovsky had obtained a promise from Gordon Atwater, Director of the Hayden Planetarium, for a sky show based on the book when it was published. The book, Velikovsky's most criticized and controversial, was an instant New York Times bestseller, topping the charts for eleven weeks while being in the top ten for twenty-seven straight weeks. Despite this popularity, overwhelming rejection of its thesis by the scientific community forced Macmillan to stop publishing it and to transfer the book to Doubleday within two months (Friedlander 1995:14).

Core ideas

In the book's preface, Velikovsky summarized his arguments:

Worlds in Collision is a book of wars in the celestial sphere that took place in historical times. In these wars the planet earth participated too. [...] The historical-cosmological story of this book is based in the evidence of historical texts of many people around the globe, on classical literature, on epics of the northern races, on sacred books of the peoples of the Orient and Occident, on traditions and folklore of primitive peoples, on old astronomical inscriptions and charts, on archaeological finds, and also on geological and paleontological material.

The book proposed that around the 15th century BCE

Common Era

, Venus

Venus

was ejected from Jupiter

Jupiter

as a comet

Comet

or comet-like object, passed near Earth

Earth

Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

(an actual collision is not mentioned). The object changed Earth's orbit and axis, causing innumerable catastrophes which were mentioned in early mythologies

Mythology

and religions around the world. Fifty-two years later, it passed close by again, stopping the Earth's rotation for a while and causing more catastrophes. Then, in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, Mars

Mars

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...

(itself displaced by Venus) made close approaches to the Earth; this incident caused a new round of disturbances and disasters. After that, the current "celestial order" was established. The courses of the planets stabilized over the centuries and Venus gradually became a "normal" planet.

These events lead to several key statements:

Venus must be still very hot as young planets radiate heat.
Venus must be rich in petroleum gases, and hydrocarbons.
Venus has an abnormal orbit in consequence of the unusual disasters that happened.

Velikovsky suggested some additional ideas that he said derived from these claims, including:

Jupiter emits radio
Radio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...

noises.
The magnetosphere
Magnetosphere
A magnetosphere is formed when a stream of charged particles, such as the solar wind, interacts with and is deflected by the intrinsic magnetic field of a planet or similar body. Earth is surrounded by a magnetosphere, as are the other planets with intrinsic magnetic fields: Mercury, Jupiter,...

of Earth reaches at least up to the moon
Moon
The Moon is Earth's only known natural satellite,There are a number of near-Earth asteroids including 3753 Cruithne that are co-orbital with Earth: their orbits bring them close to Earth for periods of time but then alter in the long term . These are quasi-satellites and not true moons. For more...

.
The sun
Sun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields...

has an electric potential
Electric potential
In classical electromagnetism, the electric potential at a point within a defined space is equal to the electric potential energy at that location divided by the charge there...

of approximately 10¹⁹ volts.
The rotation of earth can be affected by electromagnetic
Electromagnetism
Electromagnetism is one of the four fundamental interactions in nature. The other three are the strong interaction, the weak interaction and gravitation...

fields.

Velikovsky arrived at these proposals using a methodology which would today be called comparative mythology

Comparative mythology

Comparative mythology is the comparison of myths from different cultures in an attempt to identify shared themes and characteristics. Comparative mythology has served a variety of academic purposes...

- he looked for concordances in myths and written history

History

History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...

of unconnected cultures across the world, following a literal reading of their accounts of the exploits of planetary deities. In this book, he argues on the basis of ancient cosmological myths from places as disparate as India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

and China

China

Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

, Greece

Greece

Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....

and Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

, Assyria

Assyria

Assyria was a Semitic Akkadian kingdom, extant as a nation state from the mid–23rd century BC to 608 BC centred on the Upper Tigris river, in northern Mesopotamia , that came to rule regional empires a number of times through history. It was named for its original capital, the ancient city of Assur...

and Sumer

Sumer

Sumer was a civilization and historical region in southern Mesopotamia, modern Iraq during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age....

. For example, ancient Greek mythology asserts that the goddess Athena

Athena

In Greek mythology, Athena, Athenê, or Athene , also referred to as Pallas Athena/Athene , is the goddess of wisdom, courage, inspiration, civilization, warfare, strength, strategy, the arts, crafts, justice, and skill. Minerva, Athena's Roman incarnation, embodies similar attributes. Athena is...

sprang from the head of Zeus

Zeus

In the ancient Greek religion, Zeus was the "Father of Gods and men" who ruled the Olympians of Mount Olympus as a father ruled the family. He was the god of sky and thunder in Greek mythology. His Roman counterpart is Jupiter and his Etruscan counterpart is Tinia.Zeus was the child of Cronus...

. Velikovsky identifies Zeus (whose Roman counterpart was the god Jupiter) with the planet Jupiter. Velikovsky identifies Athena (the Roman Minerva) with the planet Venus. This myth, along with others from ancient Egypt

Egypt

Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...

, Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

, Mexico

Mexico

The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

, etc. are used to support the claim that "Venus was expelled as a comet and then changed to a planet after contact with a number of members of our solar system" (Velikovsky 1972:182).
–

Contemporary reactions

The plausibility of the theory was summarily rejected by the physics community, as the cosmic chain of events proposed by Velikovsky was regarded as simply contradicting the basic laws of physics.

Velikovsky's ideas had been known to astronomer

Astronomer

An astronomer is a scientist who studies celestial bodies such as planets, stars and galaxies.Historically, astronomy was more concerned with the classification and description of phenomena in the sky, while astrophysics attempted to explain these phenomena and the differences between them using...

s for years before the publication of the book, partially by his writing to astronomer Harlow Shapley

Harlow Shapley

Harlow Shapley was an American astronomer.-Career:He was born on a farm in Nashville, Missouri, and dropped out of school with only the equivalent of a fifth-grade education...

of Harvard, partially through his 1946 pamphlet Cosmos Without Gravitation, (Friedlander 1995:11), and partially by a preview of his work in an article in the August 11, 1946 edition of the New York Herald Tribune. An article about the upcoming book was published by Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...

in January 1950, which was followed by an article in Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...

(Bauer 1984:3-4) and Reader's Digest
Reader's Digest
Reader's Digest is a general interest family magazine, published ten times annually. Formerly based in Chappaqua, New York, its headquarters is now in New York City. It was founded in 1922, by DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell Wallace...

in March 1950.

Shapley, along with others such as astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

-Further reading:*Rubin, Vera , "Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin" in OUT OF THE SHADOWS: Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics, Nina Byers and Gary Williams, ed., Cambridge University Press ....

(also at Harvard), instigated a campaign against the book before its publication. Initially, they were highly critical of a publisher as reputable as Macmillan publishing such a seemingly disreputable book, even as a trade book, and then their disapproval was re-invigorated when Macmillan included it among other trade books of possible interest to professors listed under the category "Science" in the back of a textbook catalog mailed to college professors. Within two months of the book's initial release, the publishing of the book was transferred to Doubleday, which has no textbook division.

The fundamental criticism against this book from the astronomy community was that its celestial mechanics were irreconcilable with Newtonian celestial mechanics

Celestial mechanics

Celestial mechanics is the branch of astronomy that deals with the motions of celestial objects. The field applies principles of physics, historically classical mechanics, to astronomical objects such as stars and planets to produce ephemeris data. Orbital mechanics is a subfield which focuses on...

, requiring planetary orbits which could not be made to conform to the laws of conservation of energy

Conservation of energy

The nineteenth century law of conservation of energy is a law of physics. It states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. The total energy is said to be conserved over time...

and conservation of angular momentum (Bauer 1984:70). Velikovsky conceded that the behavior of the planets in his theories is not consistent with Newton's

Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...

laws of motion

Newton's laws of motion

Newton's laws of motion are three physical laws that form the basis for classical mechanics. They describe the relationship between the forces acting on a body and its motion due to those forces...

and universal gravitation

Newton's law of universal gravitation

Newton's law of universal gravitation states that every point mass in the universe attracts every other point mass with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them...

. He proposed that electromagnetic forces could be the cause of the movement of the planets, although such forces between astronomical bodies are essentially zero (Friedlander 1995:11-12).

Velikovsky tried to protect himself from criticism of his celestial mechanics by removing the original Appendix on the subject from Worlds in Collision, hoping that the merit of his ideas would be evaluated on the basis of his comparative mythology and use of literary sources alone. However this strategy did not protect him: the appendix was an expanded version of the Cosmos Without Gravitation monograph, which he had already distributed to Shapley and others in the late 1940s—and they had regarded the physics within it as egregious.

Carl Sagan

Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer and science communicator in astronomy and natural sciences. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books...

wrote that the high surface temperature of Venus was known prior to Velikovsky, and that Velikovsky misunderstood the mechanism for this heat. Velikovsky believed that Venus was heated by its close encounter with the Earth and Mars. He also did not understand the greenhouse effect on Venus, which had earlier been elucidated by astronomer Rupert Wildt

Rupert Wildt

Rupert Wildt was a German-American astronomer.He was born in Munich, Germany, and grew up in that country during World War I and its aftermath. In 1927 he was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Berlin...

. Ultimately, Venus is hot due to its proximity to the sun; it does not emit more heat than it receives from the sun, and any heat produced by its celestial movements would have long dissipated. Sagan concludes: "(1) the temperature in question was never specified [by Velikovsky]; (2) the mechanism proposed for providing this temperature is grossly inadequate; (3) the surface of the planet does not cool off with time as advertised; and (4) the idea of a high surface temperature on Venus was published in the dominant astronomical journal of its time and with an essentially correct argument ten years before the publication of Worlds in Collision" (p. 118).

Carl Sagan also noted that "Velikovsky's idea that the clouds of Venus are composed of hydrocarbons or carbohydrates is neither original nor correct." Sagan notes that the presence of hydrocarbon gases (such as petroleum gases) on Venus was earlier suggested, and abandoned, again by Rupert Wildt, whose work is not credited by Velikovsky. Also, the 1962 Mariner 2

Mariner 2

Mariner 2 , an American space probe to Venus, was the first space probe to conduct a successful planetary encounter . The first successful spacecraft in the NASA Mariner program, it was a simplified version of the Block I spacecraft of the Ranger program and an exact copy of Mariner 1...

probe was erroneously reported in the popular press to have discovered hydrocarbons on Venus. These errors were subsequently corrected, and Sagan later concluded that "[n]either Mariner 2 nor any subsequent investigation of the Venus atmosphere has found evidence for hydrocarbons or carbohydrates" (p. 113).

Regarding Jupiter's radio emissions, Sagan noted that "all objects give off radio waves if they are at temperatures above absolute zero. The essential characteristics of the Jovian radio emission — that it is nonthermal, polarized, intermittent radiation, connected with the vast belts of charged particles which surround Jupiter, trapped by its strong magnetic field — are nowhere predicted by Velikovsky. Further, his 'prediction' is clearly not linked in its essentials to the fundamental Velikovskian theses. Merely guessing something right does not necessarily demonstrate prior knowledge or a correct theory." Sagan concluded that "there is not one case where [Velikovsky's] ideas are simultaneously original and consistent with simple physical theory and observation."

Later reactions

Tim Callahan, religions editor of Skeptic, presses the case further in claiming that the composition of the atmosphere of Venus is a complete disproof of Worlds in Collision. "...Velikovsky's hypothesis stands or falls on Venus having a reducing atmosphere made up mainly of hydrocarbons. In fact, the atmosphere of Venus is made up mainly of carbon dioxide—carbon in its oxidized form—along with clouds of sulfuric acid. Therefore, it couldn't have carried such an atmosphere with it out of Jupiter and it couldn't be the source of hydrocarbons to react with oxygen in our atmosphere to produce carbohydrates. Velikovsky's hypothesis is falsified by the carbon dioxide atmosphere of Venus."

Velikovsky's hypothesis is also falsified, according to astronomer Philip Plait, by the presence of the Moon with its nearly circular orbit for which the length of the month has not changed sensibly in the 5,800 years the Jews have used their lunar calendar. "If Venus were to get so close to the Earth that it could actually exchange atmospheric contents [i.e., closer than 1000 kilometres (621.4 mi) from the surface of the Earth]," as Velikovsky claimed, ". . . the Moon would have literally been flung into interplanetary space. At the very least its orbit would have been profoundly changed, made tremendously elliptical... Had Venus done any of the things Velikovsky claimed, the Moon's orbit would have changed."

Controversy

By 1974, the controversy surrounding Velikovsky's work had reached the point where the American Association for the Advancement of Science

American Association for the Advancement of Science

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the...

felt obliged to address the situation, as they had previously done in relation to UFOs, and devoted a scientific meeting to Velikovsky. The meeting featured, among others, Velikovsky himself and Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan

. Sagan gave a critique of Velikovsky's ideas and attacked most of the assumptions made in Worlds in Collision. His criticism is published in Scientists Confront Velikovsky (Ithaca, New York, 1977) edited by Donald Goldsmith and presented in a revised and corrected version in his book Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science is a 1979 book by astrophysicist Carl Sagan. Its chapters were originally articles published between 1974 and 1979 in various magazines, including Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, Physics Today, Playboy and Scientific American...

and is much longer than that given in the talk. Sagan's arguments were aimed at a popular audience and he did not remain to debate Velikovsky in person, facts that some have taken to undermine Sagan's analysis. Sagan rebutted these charges, and further critiqued Velikovsky's ideas in his PBS television series Cosmos
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage is a thirteen-part television series written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, with Sagan as presenter. It was executive-produced by Adrian Malone, produced by David Kennard, Geoffrey Haines-Stiles and Gregory Andorfer, and directed by the producers, David...

. In Cosmos, Sagan also criticizes the scientific community for their attitude toward Velikovsky, stating that while science is a process in which all ideas are subject to a process of extensive scrutiny before any idea can be accepted as fact, the scientific community's dismissal of Velikovsky's ideas was "the worst aspect of the Velikovsky affair."

Later in November 1974 at the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association held at the University of Notre Dame, Michael W. Friedlander, professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis, confronted Velikovsky in the symposium "Velikovsky and the Politics of Science" with examples of his "substandard scholarship" involving the "distortion of the published scientific literature in quotations that he used to support his theses". For example, contrary to Velikovsky, R.A. Lyttleton did not write "the terrestrial planets, Venus included, must [emphasis added] have originated from the giant planets…" Rather, Lyttleton wrote "…it is even possible…" As Friedlander recounts, "When I gave each example, [Velikovsky's] response was 'Where did I write that?'; when I showed a photo copy of the quoted pages, he simply switched to a different topic."

A thorough examination of the original material cited in Velikovsky's publications, and a severe criticism of its use, was published by Bob Forrest. Earlier in 1974, James Fitton published a brief critique of Velikovsky's interpretation of myth, drawing on the section "The World Ages" and the later interpretation of the Trojan war, that was ignored by Velikovsky and his defenders whose indictment began: "In at least three important ways Velikovsky's use of mythology is unsound. The first of these is his proclivity to treat all myths as having independent value; the second is the tendency to treat only such material as is consistent with his thesis; and the third is his very unsystematic method." A short analysis of the position of arguments in the late 20th century was given by Dr. Velikovsky's ex-associate C. Leroy Ellenberger

C. Leroy Ellenberger

Charles Leroy Ellenberger is perhaps best known as a one-time advocate, but now a prolific critic of controversial writer Immanuel Velikovsky and his works on catastrophism. He first read Worlds in Collision in August 1969 after discovering it while browsing in the B. Dalton's Bookstore in...

, a former senior editor of Kronos
Kronos (journal)
Kronos: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Synthesis published articles on a wide range of subjects as diverse as ancient history, catastrophism and mythology. It ran 44 issues from the Spring of 1975 to the Spring of 1988. The title is an homage to the Greek name for the Roman god Saturn whose...

(a journal to promote Velikovsky's ideas) (Bauer 1995:11), in his essay. Almost ten years later, Ellenberger criticized some Velikovskian and neo-Velikovskian qua "Saturnist" ideas in an invited essay.

The storm of controversy that was created by Velikovsky's works, especially Worlds in Collision, may have helped revive the Catastrophist

Catastrophism

Catastrophism is the theory that the Earth has been affected in the past by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. The dominant paradigm of modern geology is uniformitarianism , in which slow incremental changes, such as erosion, create the Earth's appearance...

movements in the last half of the 20th century; it is also held by some working in the field that progress has actually been retarded by the negative aspects of the so-called Velikovsky Affair. The assessment of Velikovsky's work by tree-ring expert Mike Baillie

Mike Baillie

Mike Baillie is a Professor Emeritus of Palaeoecology at Queen's University of Belfast, in Northern Ireland. Baillie is a leading expert in dendrochronology, or dating by means of tree-rings...

is instructive: "But fundamentally, Velikovsky did not understand anything about comets … As if to comfort his readers, at one point he says that no planet at present has a course which poses a danger to this planet: '…only a few asteroids—mere rocks, a few kilometres in diameter—have orbits which cross the path of the earth.' … He did not know about the hazard posed by relatively small objects, and, just in case there is any doubt about his mistake, he repeats the notion by noting that a possibility exists of some future collision between planets, 'not a mere encounter between a planet and an asteroid'. This failure to recognize the power of comets and asteroids means that it is reasonable to go back to Velikovsky and delete all the physically impossible text about Venus and Mars passing close to the earth."

More recently, the absence of supporting material in ice core

Ice core

An ice core is a core sample that is typically removed from an ice sheet, most commonly from the polar ice caps of Antarctica, Greenland or from high mountain glaciers elsewhere. As the ice forms from the incremental build up of annual layers of snow, lower layers are older than upper, and an ice...

studies (such as the Greenland

Greenland

Greenland is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe for...

Dye-3 and Vostok

Vostok Station

Vostok Station was a Russian Antarctic research station. It was at the southern Pole of Cold, with the lowest reliably measured natural temperature on Earth of −89.2 °C . Research includes ice core drilling and magnetometry...

cores), bristlecone pine tree ring data

Dendrochronology

Dendrochronology or tree-ring dating is the scientific method of dating based on the analysis of patterns of tree-rings. Dendrochronology can date the time at which tree rings were formed, in many types of wood, to the exact calendar year...

, Swedish clay varve

Varve

A varve is an annual layer of sediment or sedimentary rock.The word 'varve' is derived from the Swedish word varv whose meanings and connotations include 'revolution', 'in layers', and 'circle'. The term first appeared as Hvarfig lera on the first map produced by the Geological Survey of Sweden in...

s, and many hundreds of cores taken from ocean and lake sediments from all over the world has ruled out any basis for the proposition of a global catastrophe of the proposed dimension within the Late Holocene

Holocene

The Holocene is a geological epoch which began at the end of the Pleistocene and continues to the present. The Holocene is part of the Quaternary period. Its name comes from the Greek words and , meaning "entirely recent"...

age. Also, the fossils, geological deposits, and landforms in Earth in Upheaval, which Velikovsky regards as corroborating the hypothesis presented in Worlds in Collision have been, since their publication, explained in terms of mundane noncatastrophic geologic processes. So far, the only piece of the geologic evidence which has shown to have a catastrophic origin is a "raised beach" containing coral

Coral

Corals are marine animals in class Anthozoa of phylum Cnidaria typically living in compact colonies of many identical individual "polyps". The group includes the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and secrete calcium carbonate to form a hard skeleton.A coral "head" is a colony of...

-bearing conglomerates

Conglomerate (geology)

A conglomerate is a rock consisting of individual clasts within a finer-grained matrix that have become cemented together. Conglomerates are sedimentary rocks consisting of rounded fragments and are thus differentiated from breccias, which consist of angular clasts...

found at an elevation of 1,200 feet above sea level within the Hawaiian Islands

Hawaiian Islands

The Hawaiian Islands are an archipelago of eight major islands, several atolls, numerous smaller islets, and undersea seamounts in the North Pacific Ocean, extending some 1,500 miles from the island of Hawaii in the south to northernmost Kure Atoll...

. The sediments, which were misidentified as a "raise beach", are now attributed to megatsunami

Megatsunami

Megatsunami is an informal term to describe a tsunami that has initial wave heights that are much larger than normal tsunamis...

s generated by massive landslides created by the periodic collapse of the sides of the islands. In addition, these conglomerates, as many of the items cited as evidence for his ideas in Earth in Upheaval are far too old to be used as valid evidence supporting the hypothesis presented in Worlds in Collision.

Publication

Core ideas

Contemporary reactions

Carl Sagan

Later reactions

Controversy

See also