56 AUSTRALIAN SKY & TELESCOPE April 2018
EXPLORING THE SOLAR SYSTEM by J. Kelly BeattyVelikovsky ’s Venus
A
ssummergiveswaytothe
shorter daylight hours of
autumn,Venusreturnstothe
evening sky for a long engagement —
the Evening Star will remain in view
through until mid-October.
Telescopically, Venus never offers
much to see aside from its gradual
change in apparent size and an attractive
progression of phases. Observers have
strained for centuries to glimpse any
detail on its cloud-cloaked disk. We
sometimes forget that astronomers knew
very little about this neighbour world —
so like Earth in size and mass — until
powerful radar probing and spacecraft
visits started to peel back the layers of
mystery in the 1960s.
The first artificial satellites were
still a decade away when, in 1946,
Immanuel Velikovsky finished the
manuscript for Worlds in Collision, a
book that capitalised on our relative
ignorance and put forward a theory
of Solar System formation that goes
beyond bizarre. Born in 1895 and
a student variously of history, law,
biology and psychoanalysis, Velikovsky
maintained that the inner planets only
recently assumed the serene, stableorbits they have today.
Rather,inhisschemeVenustookthe
formofahuge,roguecometafterbeing
ejected by Jupiter not long before 1500
BC. It then hurtled sunward, sideswiping
Earth twice and colliding with Mars
before settling into the almost perfectly
circular orbit it now occupies.
The basis for all this astounding,
historically recent chaos wasn’t a
detailed computation of orbital motion
but rather Velikovsky’s unwavering
belief that Old Testament narratives and
cosmological myths drawn from China,
Central America, India, Assyria and
elsewhere, were accounts of real events.
What got him started was the biblical
story of Joshua commanding the Sun
and Moon to stop moving for an entire
day and invoking a devastating hail of
stones from the sky during his battle
with the Amorites. Velikovsky was also
seeking a physical reason for the plagues
inflicted on the Egyptians in Exodus.
Venus provided all the answers. That
long tail it trailed after leaving Jupiter
had also created all kinds of havoc for
Pharaoh as Earth passed through it not
once but twice. And although we escaped
an outright collision, the proximity ofVenus caused Earth’s orbit and axial
tilt to change, a magnetic reversal,
and worldwide floods, hurricanes and
volcanic eruptions — all within recorded
history. None of this catastrophism was
chronicled by our ancestors, Velikovsky
asserts, because they suffered from
a “collective amnesia” that repressed
all memory of these occurrences. As
further proof, he details how Venus
is conspicuously absent from various
historical tabulations of planets prior to
about 2000 BC.
Velikovsky acknowledged that his
scenario was at odds with established
physics. But any inconsistencies weren’t
due to his myth-as-fact interpretations;
instead, he pointed to the “need for a
new approach to celestial mechanics” in
which electrical forces and magnetism VELIKOVSKY: BETTMANN / GETTY IMAGES, MOON/VENUS: ESO/Y.BELETSKYWImmanuel
Velikovsky (1895–
1979), seen here
in 1968, wrote
controversial books
about the history of
Earth and the Solar
System.The Moon and Venus shone
brightly above the Milky Way
in December 2009, when this
photograph was taken by
Yuri Beletsky.A controversial 1950 book ludicrously declared that our neighbour world was
spawned by Jupiter 3,500 years ago and nearly struck Earth — twice.