The many times requested episode on Immanuel Velikovsky has arrived, and it’s arrived for the first anniversary of my podcast. Yup, the first episode, on the “dark side” of the moon, came out August 1, 2011. Hard to believe that it’s been a year.
This episode’s main segment is over 20 minutes long, and yet it’s an incredibly abridged episode discussing a distillation of his ideas from “Worlds in Collision,” his first book. I go over some of Velikovsky’s bio, the politics surrounding him when he introduced his book in 1950, and then a few of the lines of evidence he used plus several refutations of his argument.
This episode may seem a tad preachy at some points. It’s hard when talking about Velikovsky to address his evidence because there really is none for his claims, so I used it to discuss how one should and should not go about science, and how Velikovsky failed at it. Rather than using available observations and making his ideas, and then forming testable predictions from them, he instead threw out most branches of science and relied on scattered myths throughout the world for his evidence. Sorry, that ain’t how it’s done.
As the first anniversary episode, I go over some obligatory stats at the end. I’m relying on all of you to increase them for August 1, 2013. 🙂
Exposing PseudoAstronomy 
I don’t normally listen to skeptic podcasts to laugh but I can’t help it at times when I listen to this podcast. This episode when explaining the rotation of Venus “…it could have been whacked by something big…” That made my day! Keep up the informative and entertaining shows sir I look forward to having your voice in my head weekly.
Comment by Erick — August 2, 2012 @ 2:50 pm |
Happy birthday EPAP!
I had found it shortly after it started and have enjoyed your work since. As I am from Belgium, I don’t think I have many fellow listeners in my country, but I’ll try to promote it a bit more around my university.
Comment by Bart — August 3, 2012 @ 5:16 am |
Thanks!
Comment by Stuart Robbins — August 3, 2012 @ 8:10 am |
Happy anniversary, Professor Robbins. Always look forward to the podcast, even when the information is way over my English-major-but-science-lovin’ head. Thanks for all the work putting out a first-rate podcast.
Comment by Tim Kotora — August 3, 2012 @ 1:27 pm |
Wonderful episode, the description of how ancient peoples should have described the passage of Venus made the laugh. Congratulations on reaching your first anniversary. Looking forward to listening to your 2nd Anniversary podcast!
Comment by Graham — August 6, 2012 @ 3:07 am |
Velikovsky has to be taken seriously. Because so many of his predictions have panned out. The rest of us are not really competent to access his source data and audit the logic of his interpretation of this source data. The fellow could read many languages. But he predicted that Venus was a new planet. Of course Earth is a very old planet. But Venus is new in its current position and orbit. Not long ago it was a comet. Since Velikovsky was shown to be correct in this matter it would seem to lend some credence to the idea that his other ideas may have something too them. But if you are all abuzz with Jew science evidence means nothing to you. And you have an ad hoc excuse not to explain the evidence but to “explain it away.” Real science does not work like that.
Comment by graemebird — January 2, 2016 @ 1:21 am |