THE VELIKOVSKY HERESIES WORLDS IN COLLISION AND ANCIENT CATASTROPHES REVISITED By Laird Scranton

Laird Scranton has steered down an entirely new path from his previous three books about ancient myth and the African Dogon. In this latest offering he asks us to rethink the 1950 theories presented in Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision.

As a college student, Scranton was intrigued by Velikovsky’s ideas and by the controversy they evoked. It should not be surprising, then, that this present book by Scranton has already elicited critical comments.

As of this writing, the reviews on Amazon.com for The Velikovsky Heresies have largely panned Scran-ton’s efforts, mostly on the premise that he is not scientifically qualified to speak in favour of digging up the Velikovsky proposals and taking an-other serious look at them. I totally disagree.

Laird Scranton is a computer programmer and teacher. However, for someone not originally and
formally trained in astronomy, we must admit that he has certainly done his homework in that subject.
With careful research, good overall organisation and clear writing, this book is an easy and interesting read. Scranton delves into both the pros and cons of Velikovsky’s proposals showing us that more recent findings about our planetary neighbours tend to reinforce those theories.

Velikovsky, himself, was not an astronomer. Russian-born, he be-came Israel’s first practicing psychia-trist and psychotherapist. However, as Scranton reminds us, “his aca-demic background, reputation, po-litical associations, and professional standing were such that the scientific community could not realistically af-ford to simply ignore his book.”

Velikovsky had worked with Albert Einstein and Dr. Chaim Weiz-mann to establish Jerusalem’s pres-tigious Hebrew University.

In 1939, to further distance him-self from the impending world war, he moved his family to Princeton, New Jersey. It was said that, when Einstein was suddenly found dead in Princeton in 1955, the one book found open on his desk was Veliko-vsky’s Worlds in Collision. In fact, the two had carried on a long-time correspondence discussing the pos-sible importance of electromagnetic effects in our solar system. For years critical of Velikovsky’s ideas, after some later astronomical discoveries
and shortly before his death, Einstein turned his opinion 180 degrees and encouraged his colleague to pursue his investigations further.

Scranton makes a good case that orthodox scientific analysis is not always the best or only method
to arrive at physical and historical truths. His programming background makes him uniquely qualified to look at Velikovsky’s way of thinking from a new angle. I would call it, for lack of a better term, a more “ho-listic” approach – one that is suited to interdisciplinary thinking. I think that is what Scranton gives us, as did Velikovsky himself. Many of us remember Veliko-vsky’s main premise: that ancient legends all over the globe, including biblical accounts, tell the story that a large object collided with and was “swallowed” by Jupiter; that soon after that a comet-like body was emitted from the Jovian surface and circled the Sun for a long time, ap-proaching both Earth and Mars and causing catastrophic damage to both before it settled into its own orbit in our solar system.

Accordingly, this would mean Venus is a relatively young planet, and conditions in and on it should indicate it had a major collision with a planetary-sized object in its past. Scranton shows us that recent find-ings seem to substantiate this.

Some other key factors Scran-ton cites that also tend to confirm Velikovsky’s thesis include the asser-tions that:
• Jupiter’s core is comparatively small and hot, which could be the result of its past absorption
of another object and the sub-sequent ejection of a comet that finally settled into orbit as Venus; in fact, newly discovered ancient astronomic records describe the Venus/comet/erratic orbit sce-nario.
• Crustal damage on Mars suggests collision with another planetary-sized object.
• The existence of a rotational resonance between Earth and Venus could be accounted for if at one time the two came into close proximity.
• Records of Earth’s volcanic ac-tivity and climate change coincide with dates that could have seen
the close approach of Venus and Mars.
• Ancient Earth civilisations simultaneously record a calendar change from a 360-day year to a
365-day year followed by signifi-cant cooling at the time Veliko-vsky claims Mars made a close approach resulting in a change in Earth’s orbit and tilt.
• And, modern probes of Venus document unexpected attributes that could indicate it is quite young and was once, indeed, a comet.

With regard to ancient cultures’ concurring descriptions of Venus, Scranton says, “For me, one very
confusing aspect of the Velikovsky controversy is the apparent disin-terest of traditional astronomers in pursuing and explaining this body of ancient descriptions, since clearly something of potential astronomic interest must have been occurring.”

He adds, “…over time, it seems that virtually all of these scientists – including Einstein – eventually found themselves in the extremely awk-ward position of having to reverse, qualify, recast, reinterpret, or with-draw their original complaint against Velikovsky as, one by one, various seemingly impossible prospects proved themselves to be possible.”

He concludes, “…it may be true that the often rather sharp bounda-ries that have traditionally been
drawn between various scientific fields of study actually do a disser-vice to the processes of discovery, that cross-application of methodolo-gies and perspectives from field to field might ultimately prove help-ful…. Perhaps the greatest failing to be cited among the many critics of Immanuel Velikovsky would be their knee-jerk rush to publicly brand Ve-likovsky as a heretic, under circum-stances in which all parties might have been better served if they had simply chosen to explore whether – and from what perspectives – Veliko-vsky’s unorthodox views might make sense.”

Laird Scranton has done us such a service by looking at those unor-thodox views from the vantage point of another discipline. And, from that alternate vantage point, I feel he has done a commendable job of analy-sis and synthesis in reconciling the ancient historical accounts of Veliko-vsky’s theories with scientific findings that have been made since Worlds in Collision was first published back in 1950. Surely to author the impossible is a contradiction in terms, yet it is our insatiable hunger for mystery that drives so many of the great minds of our times. Author Jeffrey Kripal is no less fascinated with the impossible. His new book attempts to recover a history of “thinking off the page”
through the work of four investi-gators of telepathic experiences, ghosts, UFO encounters, and other strange or unexplainable instances of the 20th century supernatural.

Jeffrey Kripal is both a philosopher and historian of religion and uses his expertise – by focusing an exclusive chapter each on the work of Frederic Myers, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee and Bertrand Meheust – to construct a history of theorising the occult that takes in philosophy, anthropology and post-structuralism.

He begins with Myers who coined the word “telepathy” and was a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research in Cambridge in the 1880s. He came to believe that most of reality, including our own consciousness, lay hidden, and that the human race was evolving pro-gressively towards greater supernatu-ral powers. He spent much of his life attempting to reconcile the claims of science and religion, conducting telepathic experiments, testing spir-itualist mediums under “laboratory”
conditions, and collecting stories of deathbed transmissions.

The second case study is Charles Fort. He was also a compiler of phe-nomena, a “collector of coincidenc-es” who studied newspapers in the early 20th century, gathering reports of hauntings, ghosts, ectoplasm and things that simply should not be. His science-fiction novel, X, written in 1915, suggested that our reality might be like a film, projected from the rays of some alien consciousness, an idea taken up by many science fiction writers.

Kripal then focuses on Jacques Vallee, the Internet entrepreneur and Rosicrucian mystic who after a long study of UFO sightings decided they were potential evidence for psychic forces emanating from the future.

Finally he focuses on sociologist Bertrand Meheust, whose studies of mystical phenomena led him to
suspect that popular accounts of paranormal experience may in fact reveal a history of real supernatural occurrences.

These unusual and creative think-ers, who diligently tried to explain the impossible, are largely unacknowl-edged by science or even science-fiction writers. Kripal has written this study in the hope the evidence for the supernatural means we rethink our basic beliefs about the nature of subjective and objective reality.

What would our world look and feel like if we did not doubt telepathy actually existed? Or what if the evi-dence for UFOs, or “visitations” of the Virgin Mary, were convincing enough to appear real rather than the delu-sions of a few? Would this change consciousness or influence our under-standing of science, time, religious belief, or perhaps more importantly, our innate “sense of the sacred”?

“I am not asking us to know more. I am asking us to imagine more,” he writes in the Introduction. “This ability to imagine more is pre-cisely what defines an ‘author of the impossible’ for me,” Kripal says.

Kripal also hopes that as more and more people become aware of the work of these great thinkers, we will finally concede that thoughts once thought, and then dissemi-nated to others, gives us “plausible reasons to consider the impossible possible. Thus they (the writers of the impossible) become both author and author-ize it.”

These are clearly huge, con-sciousness-changing questions. We are all products of our culture and
mass-belief, whether we acknowl-edge this or not. This book encour-ages us to put these beliefs to one side and consider telepathy, telepor-tation, precognition and UFOs with an open mind.

Many New Dawn readers will be familiar with some of the authors Kripal focuses on, but it is good to read their stories in historical con-text. He deftly outlines the gifts and specialities of each author. Bertrand Meheust, for example, teaches that we really do shape our worlds, even if we do not fully determine them.

“We are magicians all. But as whole cultures extended through centuries of time, we are much more than a collection of knowing and unknowing magicians stumbling about with their consensual spells called language, belief and custom. We are veritable wizards endowed with almost un-believable powers to shape our new worlds of experience and realise dif-ferent aspects of the real,” he writes.

The chapter on Jacques Vallee is particularly insightful with lots of per-sonal touches. Many New Dawn read-ers will know of Vallee’s early career as an entrepreneur in the computer industry of Silicon Valley and the de-velopment of the Internet. But he was also the inspiration for the character of the French scientist, Claude Lacombe, played by François Truffaut in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi classic, Close Encoun-ters of the Third Kind.

Jeffrey J. Kripal has done a masterful job pulling all this informa-tion together and offering insightful
visions of the minds that opened the doors to the impossible becoming possible. Authors of the Impossible is a “must have” for any serious student of alternative thought and anyone who wants a strong grounding in the origins of mind-science. It is certainly a well-thumbed book in my library, with several pages underlined.

Following up his two previous bestsellers, The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, Columbia University Professor of Physics and Mathematics Brian Greene has car-ried on in his attempt to enlighten the lay reader to leading edge de-velopments in scientific research into the deepest mysteries of both the micro-world and the macro-world of not only our own universe, but other universes that may exist beyond our current ability to contact them.

Including 30 pages of notes, mostly for the more technically inclined, an extensive index, and using metaphor, analogy, historical anecdotes, and a touch of humour, Professor Greene looks at the latest
theoretical thinking and experimen-tal analyses to give, as he says in the Preface, “…a broadly accessible account of some of the strangest and, should they prove correct, most revealing insights of modern phys-ics. Many of the concepts require the reader to abandon comfortable modes of thought and to embrace unanticipated realms of reality.”

What spurred Greene to give us an up-to-date account of develop-ments in fundamental theoretical physics is that they have led inves-tigators to the serious considera-tion of different types of parallel
universes. In the book, he identifies 9 varieties of what are called “multi-verses.” And, what is so amazing to Greene and to his colleagues around the world is that “…all of the parallel-universe proposals that we will take seriously (in the book) emerge unbidden from the mathematics of theories developed to explain con-ventional data and observation.”

Proceeding like a class in the con-ceptual, non-technical overview of contemporary physics, displaying his knack for making difficult concepts easy to understand by relating them to common, everyday examples from life, and ascribing nomencla-ture generally used in the field of cosmology, Dr. Greene first exam-ines what is known as the Quilted Multiverse. He begins the discussion
with a review of the Big Bang and Einsteinian relativity to illustrate “…that basic physical principles estab-lish that if the cosmos is infinitely large, it is home to infinitely many parallel worlds – some identical to ours, some differing from ours, many bearing no resemblance to our world at all.”

Because astronomers have calculated that we can only see out from earth about 41 billion light-
years (called the cosmic horizon – an enormous distance, but certainly less than infinite), if the universe itself is infinite, there must be an infinite amount of other regions of space that have their own cosmic horizons. If those regions are suffi-ciently distant from each other, such an array would look like a patchwork quilt of an infinite number of finite regions that are individual universes
themselves. Such a scenario is called a Patchwork or Quilted Multiverse. In such a multiverse, there would be endless doppelgangers – exact, re-petitive reproductions of everything we experience, even ourselves.

Greene’s second type of mul-tiverse is called the Inflationary Multiverse. This one is based on the continual expansion of our universe that would eternally produce bub-ble universes, and only one of those would be the one we see. We can think of the bubble universes in the Inflationary Multiverse as the holes in an ever-expanding Swiss cheese cosmos.

Professor Greene’s third and fourth types of multiverses derive from String theory and from the braneworlds of M-theory. In Chapter 4, he reiterates from his previous books a clear explanation of vari-ous aspects of quantum mechan-ics resulting in String theory, extra spatial dimensions, singularities, and black holes that lead us into Chapter 5’s discussion of the Brane Multiverse and the Cyclic Multiverse. The former consists of three-dimensional branes (don’t worry – Greene explains what branes are) that float in higher di-mensions with other branes, and the latter derives from the collisions of those braneworlds that result in new universes with their own big bangs.

We are next introduced to some-thing called the Landscape Multiverse. It derives from a combination of the Inflationary Multiverse and String theory.

In 1998, two separate teams of astronomers measured a positive but tiny number for Einstein’s cosmologi-cal constant – a value that gives us the amount of dark, invisible energy thought to be existing uniformly throughout space. Dark energy gov-erns the repulsive gravitational force that drives our universe’s inflation. Contrary to what we would expect – that after the Big Bang the inflation of the universe would gradually slow down – the measurements indicated that for approximately the past half of our universe’s life its rate of ex-pansion has been accelerating.

String theory tells us that each of the ever-increasing number of bubble universes in an Inflation-
ary Multiverse contains a different configuration of extra dimensions “…providing a cosmological framework that realises all possibilities.” It also tells us that different values of the cosmological constant in each bub-ble universe give rise to “...bubbles inside of bubbles inside of bubbles...” When combined with accelerating expansion, this bubble tunnelling process provides an entire “land-
scape” of different universes. Hence, the totality is called a Landscape Multiverse.

50-page long, Chapter 8 describes what’s called the Quantum Multiverse – a multiverse that emerges directly from quantum mechanics. Greene reminds us of the double-slit experi-ment and its consequential interfer-ence pattern in order to guide us through his explanations of a particle’s probability wave and Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpre-tation which dictate that the act of meas-
urement/observation results in the collapse of the wave function locating only one position for a given particle – one defi-nite, observed reality outcome.

Professor Greene then takes us to the realm of the Holographic Multi-verse where reality takes place on a universe’s distant boundary surface and projects its information into the 3D world we know and experience as a kind of holographic movie. We can think of this as we would think of the information in an architect’s blue-prints being translated into the actual physical realisation of a building. In other words, the boundary surface of a universe can be thought of as a physically equivalent parallel universe.

Greene adds, “That familiar reality may be mirrored, or perhaps even produced, by phenomena taking
place on a faraway, lower-dimen-sional surface ranks among the most unexpected developments in all of theoretical physics…. Looking to the future, I suspect that the holo-graphic principle will be a beacon for physicists well into the twenty-first century.”

The 8th and 9th multiverses identi-fied in the book involve both actual and computer simulations. The 8th variety is called a Simulated Multi-verse. Here, Greene takes a bold step in contemplating universe creation by future humans in the posses-sion of very advanced technologies. There are two types of these we can think of: (1) usual, physical universes, and (2) virtual, computer-generated
universes. The first involves artificial-ly producing a white hole that spews out matter. The second is akin to the conceptual presentation in movies like The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and Vanilla Sky.

The 9th and final multiverse dis-cussed is what Professor Greene calls the Ultimate Multiverse. It is his own rationalisation for the existence of a multiverse, independent of being a by-product of quantum mechanics, inflationary cosmology, String theory, or any other such applications that led indirectly to the previous 8 types of multiverses. He surmises, “Maybe math is more than just a description of reality. Maybe math is reality.” Perhaps, “Different collections of mathematical equations are different universes. The Ultimate Multiverse is thus the by-product of this perspec-tive on mathematics.” (M.I.T.’s Max Tegmark calls this the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis.)

Greene further posits, “Mathe-matical existence is synonymous with physical existence. And since this would be true for any and all math, this provides another road leading us to the Ultimate Multiverse.” It’s another way of saying that every possible universe we can imagine, and therefore describe with a math-ematical equation, is, somewhere and at some time, a real universe.

Greene ends with questions like, “Can scientific theories that invoke a multiverse be tested?” And, “Should we believe mathematics?” In fact, he admits that math is central to all he discusses. The multiverse theo-ries examined in his book “rely on a belief that mathematics is tightly stitched into the fabric of reality.”

He adds in conclusion, “It’s only through the rational pursuit of theo-ries, even those that whisk us into strange and unfamiliar domains, that we stand a chance of revealing the expanse of reality.”

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